I 


:iii 


I 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


THE  ORTHOCRATIC  STATE 


THE    ORTHOCRATIC 

STATE 

THE  UNCHANGING  PRINCIPLES  OF 
CIVICS  AND  GOVERNMENT 


BY 

JOHN  SHERWIN  CROSBY 


flew  l^otft 

STURGIS  &  WALTON 

COMPANY 

1915 

All  rights  reserved 


Copyright,  1915 
By  STURGIS  &  WALTON  COMPANY 


Set  DP  and  electrotrped.     Published  May,  1915 


To 

JOHN  J.  MURPHY,  LAWSON  PURDY, 
CHARLES  H.  INGERSOLL 

AND 

WILLIAM  LUSTGARTEN 

But  for  whose  kind  offices  it  might  not  have 

been   published,   this   booklet   is 

affectionately  dedicated,  (in  an 

hour  of  physical  darkness). 

J.  S.  C. 


1561 260 


PREFACE 

There  is  no  lack  of  books  telling  what  govern- 
ment has  been  and  is.  This  little  volume  may 
aid  the  student  in  his  endeavour  to  determine  for 
himself  what  it  ought  to  be  and  to  do,  as  well  as 
what  it  ought  not  to  undertake.  There  is  per- 
haps no  greater  hindrance  to  civic  progress  than 
the  impression  that  principles  of  government  are 
too  abstruse  for  common  understanding,  to  which 
is  often  added  the  handicap  of  starting  out  in  the 
study  of  government  with  a  confident  knowledge 
of  "so  much  that  isn't  so,"  and  of  reasoning  from 
maxims  rather  than  axioms. 

What  we  ought  to  do,  whether  as  citizens  or  as 
men,  in  matters  affecting  our  fellow  men,  is  not 
a  question  of  precedent  but  of  principle,  and  is 
to  be  learned  not  so  much  from  history  as  by  use 
of  that  common  sense  upon  which  we  rely  in  form- 
ing our  judgments  of  history,  whose  lessons  serve 
'but  to  illustrate  and  confirm  our  perhaps  innate 
ideas  of  right  and  wrong  as  between  man  and 

man.     It  was  the  deliberate  conclusion  of  Im- 

7 


8  The  Orthocratic  State 

manuel  Kant,  as  expressed  in  his  "Critique  of 
Pure  Reason,"  that  with  regard  to  the  essential  in- 
terests of  human  nature  the  highest  philosophy- 
can  achieve  no  more  than  that  guidance  which 
nature  has  vouchsafed  even  to  the  meanest  under- 
standing. 

The  political  inquiry,  whose  methods  and  out- 
come are  hereinafter  briefly  outlined,  was  first 
impelled  by  what  seemed  to  be  the  importance, 
the  justice  even,  of  meeting  the  evidently  serious 
contention  of  the  Anarchists  with  something  more 
intelligent  and  intelligible  than  mere  denial,  and 
was  prosecuted  with  the  endeavour  to  determine  by 
what  right,  if  any,  the  compulsory  State  is  main- 
tained ;  for  if  it  has  no  right  to  be,  it  can  have  no 
right  to  act.  Nor  was  answer  to  the  question 
readily  to  be  found.  In  no  treatise  on  govern- 
ment, in  no  declaration  of  sovereign  authority, 
although  much  was  often  taken  for  granted,  was 
it  clearly  shown  by  what  right  any  majority  can 
compel  an  unwilling  and  otherwise  unoffending 
minority  to  unite  with  them  in  organising  and 
maintaining  the  State,  or  with  what  justice  any 
man  not  desiring  to  co-operate  in  its  maintenance, 
not  asking  its  aid,  and  himself  interfering  with  no 
man's  freedom,  can  be  forcibly  compelled  to  be- 


Preface  9 

come  a  supporting  member  of  it,  and,  to  that  ex- 
tent at  least,  responsible  for  its  action.  There 
were  other  questions  calling  for  definite  answer, 
among  which  was  that  raised  by  the  Socialists,  as 
to  how  far  the  State  may  justly  go  in  assuming 
control  of  the  means  and  methods  of  wealth  pro- 
duction. Conclusions  resulting  from  such  in- 
quiry, finally  reached  a  generation  or  more  ago 
and  but  confirmed  by  the  experience,  observation 
and  reflection  of  subsequent  years,  are  now  sub- 
mitted, not  as  presenting  anything  entirely  new 
in  political  thought,  but  as  suggesting  the  impor- 
tance of  much  that,  however  familiar  to  that 
thought,  is  almost  entirely  overlooked  in  political 
action. 

Brief  as  they  are,  the  chapters  following  will 
be  found  to  contain  an  orderly  exposition  of  what 
are  believed  to  be  the  basic  principles  of  govern- 
ment; a  definite  outline,  simple  analysis,  and 
serviceable  classification  of  its  legitimate  func- 
tions ;  as  well  as  a  summary  of  present-day  abuses 
of  its  power,  and  of  problems  resulting  therefrom. 
The  reader's  attention  is  respectfully  directed  to 
the  consideration  given  to  the  doctrine  of  natural 
rights,  to  the  question  of  absolute  right  to  main- 
tain the  compulsory  State,  and  to  the  limits  of  its 


10  The  Orthocratic  State 

authority;  to  the  distinction  made  between  things, 
functions  and  values  in  their  nature  individual 
and  private,  and  those  which  are  no  less  naturally 
social  or  public;  to  the  relation  shown  to  exist  be- 
tween corporations  and  the  trusts;  as  well  as  to 
suggestions  in  regard  to  solving  problems  of 
government. 

In  so  far  as  it  has  yet  to  be  filled  in  with  the 
actuality  of  practice,  the  outline  presented  is  of 
necessity  a  mere  theory,  a  purely  abstract  concep- 
tion of  what  may  or  may  not  be  realised,  as  at  one 
time  or  another  might  have  been  as  truly  said  of 
any  and  every  most  approved  theory  now  in 
practice.  But  we  need  not  wait  on  practice  to 
know  this  much,  that  in  so  far  as  a  theory  of 
government  ignores  basic  principles  of  justice  as 
between  man  and  man,  it  will  ultimately  fail  in 
practice.  History  has  nowhere  contradicted  this 
categorically  imperative,  a  priori  conclusion. 

Justice  and  freedom,  its  object  and  comple- 
ment, are  but  abstractions,  toward  the  realisation 
of  which  the  race  seems  to  be  surely  if  slowly  ad- 
vancing. The  only  conception  of  justice  with 
which  the  State  has  any  proper  concern  is  that 
arising  from  consideration  of  man's  conduct  to- 
ward man.     As  said  by  an  able  political  writer 


Preface  11 

and  now  distinguished  statesman,  in  his  admirable 
text-book  "The  State,"  "Government,  in  its  last 
analysis,  is  organised  force."  It  is,  moreover, 
always  a  force  exerted  by  man  upon  man,  and  its 
justice  depends  on  how  it  affects  individual  en- 
joyment of  the  natural,  inalienable  rights  of  man. 
Once  it  wrongs  the  individual,  it  has  begun  its 
injury  to  Society,  which  can  suffer  only  through 
its  members.  In  order  to  determine  whether  an 
act  of  government  is  or  would  be  unjust  or  not, 
it  is  necessary  to  inquire  what  would  be  its  nature, 
whether  it  would  be  unjust  toward  any  human 
being,  if  performed  without  civil  authority;  for 
that  which  would  be  harmful  and  unjust  if  done 
by  an  individual  or  a  mob,  can  be  neither  harmless 
nor  just  when  done  by  the  State.  If  such  ques- 
tion is  not  to  be  answered,  it  is  idle  to  talk  of  civic 
righteousness,  of  good  government,  or  of  an 
orthocratic,  or  rightly  governing  State. 

New  York,  1913. 


CONTENTS 

chapter  page 

Preface    7 

I     Introduction 17 

II     Society  and  the  State 26 

III  The  Functions  of  Government     ...  50 

IV  Abuses  of  Civil  Power 84 

V     Civic   Problems 122 


THE  ORTHOCRATIC  STATE 


THE 
ORTHOCRATIC  STATE 

// 

/CHAPTER  I 

INTRODUCTION 

Of  all  the  useful  arts  that  of  government  alone, 
although  so  long  and  universally  practised,  is  yet 
without  its  kindred  science.  Practice  of  the  other 
arts  has  in  each  instance  led  to  the  discovery  and 
systematic  arrangement  of  the  principles,  to  de- 
velopment of  the  science,  upon  which  correct  prac- 
tice depends.  Not  so  with  government.  The 
"Politics"  of  Aristotle  is  a  work  quite  as  scientific 
as  any  most  modern  treatise  on  government. 

Different  reasons  may  be  assigned  for  the  slow 
progress  of  the  art  of  government  toward  the 
scientific  stage.  One  obstacle  has  been  the  per- 
sistent opposition  of  the  governing  classes  to  even 
the  discussion  of  new  political  theories,  lest  their 
adoption  might  interfere  with  existing  privileges; 

but  this  attitude  of  tlie  privileged  classes  will 

17 


18  The  Orthocratic  State 

hardly  account  for  the  continued  acceptance  of  un- 
scientific theories  by  political  writers  of  un- 
doubted ability,  sincerity  and  courage.  These  all 
agree  in  holding  with  Aristotle  that  justice  is  the 
end  of  political  science,  and  then  like  him  attempt 
to  develop  the  science  from  hypotheses  as  fanci- 
ful as  was  that  of  the  vortices  from  which  the 
early  astronomers  sought  to  construct  their  science. 
It  is,  of  course,  impossible  to  develop  a  true, 
scientific  theory  of  government  from  a  false 
hypothesis  regarding  a  matter  so  fundamentally 
vital  as  the  nature  of  the  State  and  the  seat  or 
source  of  its  authority  to  govern.  Aristotle  sup- 
posed the  State  to  be  "one  of  the  works  of  nature," 
and  held  that  the  supreme  power  should  be  exer- 
cised by  men  of  pre-eminent  and  heroic  virtue, 
*'if  such  be  found."  A  somewhat  similar  mis- 
conception of  the  State  has  been  that  of  those  who 
have  regarded  it  as  a  department  or  bureau,  as  it 
were,  of  an  all-embracing  theocratic  government, 
and  as  existing  and  governing  by  divine  authority. 
When  it  came  to  be  realised  that  government,  in- 
cluding the  formation  of  the  State  as  well  as  the 
maintenance  and  exercise  of  its  power,  is  made  up 
of  activities  as  human  as  any  in  which  mankind 
engages  and  as  subject  as  any  to  the  human  will, 


Introduction  19 

it  was  sought  to  account  for  existence  of  the  State 
by  supposing  it  to  have  been  in  some  way  estab- 
lished by  and  according  to  the  will  of  man,  and 
in  order  to  preserve  the  idea  of  justice,  the  estab- 
lishment was  assumed  to  have  been  by  general 
agreement  or  common  consent  of  all  men. 

The  hypothesis  of  a  social  compact  was  stated 
by  Hobbes  in  his  "Leviathan"  as  follows: 

"A  commonwealth  is  said  to  be  instituted  when 
a  multitude  of  men  do  agree  and  covenant,  every 
one  with  every  one,  that  to  whatever  man  or  as- 
sembly of  men  shall  be  given  by  the  major  part 
the  right  to  present  the  person  of  them  all,  that  is 
to  say,  to  be  their  representative;  every  one,  as 
well  he  that  voted  for  it  as  he  that  voted  against 
it,  shall  authorise  all  the  actions  and  judgments 
of  that  man  or  assembly  of  men  in  the  same  man- 
ner as  if  they  were  his  own,  to  the  end  to  live 
peaceably  amongst  themselves  and  be  protected 
against  other  men. 

"From  this  institution  of  a  commonwealth  are 
derived  all  the  rights  and  faculties  of  him  or  them 
on  whom  sovereign  power  is  conferred  by  the  con- 
sent of  the  people  assembled." 

Locke,  writing  but  a  few  years  after  Hobbes, 
stated  the  hypothesis  as  follows: 


20  The  Orthocratic  State 

"Whosoever,  therefore,  out  of  a  state  of  na- 
ture unite  into  a  community,  must  be  understood 
to  give  up  all  the  power  necessary  to  the  ends  for 
which  they  unite  into  society  to  the  majority  of 
the  community,  unless  they  expressly  agreed  on 
any  number  greater  than  the  majority.  And  this 
is  done  by  barely  agreeing  to  unite  into  one  poli- 
tical society,  which  is  all  the  compact  that  is  or 
needs  be  between  the  individuals  that  enter  into 
or  make  up  a  commonwealth.  And  thus  that 
which  begins  and  actually  constitutes  any  political 
society  is  nothing  but  the  consent  of  any  number 
of  freemen,  capable  of  majority,  to  unite  and  in- 
corporate into  such  society.  And  thus  that,  and 
that  only,  which  did  or  could  give  beginning  to 
any  lawful  government  in  the  world." 

He  also  held  that  a  man's  tacit  consent  to  an 
established  government  was  to  be  inferred  from 
the  mere  fact  of  his  being  within  its  dominions. 

Rousseau  nearly  a  century  after  Locke  wrote 
as  follows: 

"If  therefore  we  take  from  the  social  contract 
everything  that  is  not  essential  to  it,  we  shall  find 
it  reduced  to  the  following  terms :  'We,  the  con- 
tracting parties,  do  jointly  and  severally  submit 
our  persons  and  abilitie?  to  the  supreme  direction 


Introduction  21 

of  the  general  will  of  all ;  and  in  a  collective  body 
receive  each  member  into  that  body  as  an  in- 
divisible part  of  the  whole.'  " 

He  held  further  that,  although  the  clauses  of 
the  contract  may  perhaps  never  have  been  for- 
mally promulgated,  they  are  yet  universally  the 
same,  and  everywhere  tacitly  acknowledged  and 
received. 

The  statement  in  the  preamble  to  the  Declara- 
tion of  Independence  to  the  effect  that  govern- 
ments derive  their  just  powers  "from  the  con- 
sent of  the  governed,"  has  been  regarded  by  some 
as  recognising  the  social  contract,  but  it  is  not 
probable  that  Jefferson  meant  to  assert  anything 
more  than  that  the  governed  should  always  have 
a  voice  in  the  government.  He  had  in  mind  the 
imposition  upon  the  American  people  of  laws 
passed  by  a  parliament  in  which  they  had  no  rep- 
resentation. 

Writers  of  the  present  day,  in  attempting  to  ac- 
count for  authority  of  the  State,  seldom  if  ever 
resort  to  the  fiction  of  a  social  contract.  Recog- 
nising the  absurdity  of  assuming  that  each  mem- 
ber of  society  gives  his  individual  consent  to  or- 
ganisation of  the  State,  they  assume  it  to  have 
been  organised  by  the  people,  but  by  the  people 


22  The  Orthocratic  State 

acting  in  some  other  than  their  individual  capac^ 
ity  and  by  some  right,  if  any,  other  than  individ- 
ual, natural  right. 

One  able  and  learned  author,  writing  on  "The 
Nature  of  the  State,"  states  his  conclusions  as 
follows: 

"It  therefore  appears  that  the  origin  of  the 
State  must  be  conceived  as  an  act  of  the  People 
rather  than  of  individuals.  The  existence  of  a 
common  or  'General  Will'  must  be  predicated, 
and  the  creation  of  the  State  held  to  be  due  to  its 
volition."  .  .  . 

"The  existence  of  the  State  is  rationally  justi- 
fied because  the  result  of  the  exercise  of  its  author- 
ity is  in  all  cases,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  to  preserve 
freedom  rather  than  to  destroy  it."  .  .  . 

"There  is  no  onus  upon  the  State  to  justify 
its  existence  as  an  infringement  upon  a  predicated 
natural  freedom  of  the  individual." 

It  is  not  readily  to  be  seen  how  a  practical 
science  of  government  can  be  developed  from  this 
latest  hypothesis,  that  of  a  "predicated"  General 
Will.  Government  can  be  nothing  more  nor  less 
than  human  power  humanly  organised  for  the 
control  of  human  conduct.  The  very  organisa- 
tion of  that  power,  the  act  of  instituting  the  State, 


Introduction  23 

is  merely  human  conduct,  which  in  its  last  an- 
alysis is  always  either  right  or  wrong,  just  or  un- 
just, as  between  man  and  man.  No  man  can 
justify  his  voluntary  acts  by  any  appeal  to  the 
general  will.  That  will  can  never  be  more  than 
the  concurring  wills  of  all  the  people.  When- 
ever it  calls  for  forcible  control  of  any  of  the 
people,  it  is  clear  that  their  wills  are  not  in  ac- 
cord with  the  general,  and  that  they  have  only  to 
outnumber  their  opponents  to  have  a  general  will 
of  their  own.  For  all  the  practical  purposes  of 
government,  including  that  of  establishing  the 
State,  the  general  will  can  manifest  itself  only  as 
the  will  of  a  majority  in  numbers  or  power,  and 
whether  it  be  just  or  not  must  depend  upon  the 
wills  of  the  individuals  composing  such  majority. 
Authority  for  establishment  and  maintenance 
of  the  compulsory  State  has  been  challenged  by 
individual  wills  as  sincere  as  any  composing  the 
general  will,  and  their  challenge  is  not  to  be  an- 
swered by  any  hypothesis  regarding  the  just  war- 
rant for  such  establishment.  It  may  not  be  clear 
to  them  that  *'the  result  of  the  exercise  of  its 
(the  State's)  authority  is  in  all  cases,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  to  preserve  freedom  rather  than  to  de- 
stroy it."     The  struggle  through  all  the  ages  has 


24  The  Ortliocratic  State 

been  to  preserve  freedom  from  encroachments 
which  could  not  have  been  maintained  but  for  the 
State,  and  to-day  there  are  many  staunch  believers 
in  the  authority  of  the  State  who  nevertheless  ap- 
prehend the  danger  of  an  unjust  and  tyrannical 
extension  of  its  power  over  the  industrial  activi- 
ties and  private  affairs  of  its  members. 

The  people  are  fast  waking  to  a  sense  of  their 
"sovereign  power,"  and,  like  the  sovereigns  of  all 
time,  are  not  unlikely  to  experiment  with  it. 
Notwithstanding  any  and  all  need  of  legislative 
reform,  of  which  there  may  indeed  be  much,  it 
might  nevertheless  be  well  for  all  legislation  to 
cease  for  a  time,  provided  the  people  would  mean- 
while try  to  learn  by  what  right  they  legislate;  to 
get  a  clear  understanding  of  what  the  State  really 
is;  of  the  just  and  only  warrant  for  its  existence 
or  for  exercise  of  its  power;  of  what  it  may  justly 
do,  and  of  what  it  ought  to  let  alone.  Nor  is  the 
acquirement  of  such  an  understanding  by  any 
means  so  difficult  as  might  appear  from  reading 
laboured  treatises  on  government.  As  was  said  by 
Aristotle,  "The  multitude  even  though  they  know 
nothing  of  the  political  science  and  hold  no  mag- 
istracy, still  can  form  a  good  practical  judgment 
upon  government  in  general,  and  even  a  better 


Introduction  25 

one  than  those  in  office  who  can  not  see  their  own 
defects  and  errors." 

In  the  chapters  following,  attempt  is  made  not 
only  to  account  for  the  well-warranted  existence 
of  the  State,  but  also  to  point  out  the  source  and 
mark  the  limits  of  its  authority,  not  from  any 
hypothesis,  but  on  grounds  as  plain,  rational  and 
substantial  as  any  upon  which  human  conduct  can 
possibly  be  justified. 


./ 


CHAPTER  II 

SOCIETY    AND    THE    STATE 

I    _ 
"Before  Man  made  us  citizens,   great  Nature  made 
us  men." 

Lowell. 


/       \ 


■'■■^  f  Civics  is  that  branch  of  ethics,  or  of  the  science 
/  of  human  duty,  which  treats  of  man's  duty  as  a 
\  citizen,  or  member  of  the  State.  In  order  to  un- 
derstand our  duties  as  citizens  we  must  know  what 
the  State  is,  as  well  as  why  and  how  we  came  to 
be  members  of  it.  We  all  know  in  a  general  way 
that  it  is  an  association  formed  for  the  main- 
tenance of  that  orderly  regulation  of  human  con- 
duct and  affairs  which  is  called  civil  government, 
but  we  may  not  have  sufficiently  considered  the 
nature  and  purpose  of  its  authority  to  be  fully 
alive  to  our  individual  responsibility  for  the  ex- 
ercise of  its  power. 

Born  into  the  already  long-established  State, 
we  are  prone  to  look  upon  its  much-exploited 
power  as  having  its  existence  in  the  nature  of 

26 


Society  and  the  State  27 

things,  and  to  utilise  it  as  we  do  the  forces  of 
nature  for  any  and  every  purpose  to  which  it  may 
seem  adapted.  Or,  if  we  realise  that  it  is  human 
power  contributed  by  and  belonging  to  all  the 
people  in  common,  we  may  make  the  mistake  of 
supposing  that  it  may  at  least  be  used  for  any  pur- 
pose to  which  the  majority  may  choose  to  apply 
it. 

It  is  true  that  in  deciding  what  the  action  of  an 
organised  body  of  individuals  shall  be  it  is  from 
the  nature  of  things  necessary  for  the  will  of  the 
majority  to  prevail,  but  no  majority  can  justly 
make  use  of  any  organisation  for  any  other  pur- 
pose than  that  for  which  it  is  formed  and  its 
power  maintained.  Even  if  the  State  were  an 
association  into  which  the  people  had  all  of  them 
voluntarily  entered  and  from  which  they  could 
withdraw  at  will,  its  power  could  not  be  justly 
used  for  any  other  purpose  than  that  for  which  it 
was  contributed.  Much  less  can  civil  power,  at- 
tained and  upheld  as  it  is  through  that  compulsory 
organisation  which  the  State  actually  is  and  from 
which  no  member  can  withdraw,  whatever  the 
majority  may  do, — much  less  can  power  so  ac- 
quired and  maintained  be  justly  used  by  any  ma- 
jority however  great  for  any  ultimate  purpose 


28  The  Orthocratic  State 

other  than  that  which  alone  justifies  the  compul- 
sion necessary  to  its  support.  Civil  power  is  a 
sacred  trust,  one  not  voluntarily  confided  but 
arbitrarily  assumed,  and  we  can  not  be  too  scrupu- 
lous in  the  discharge  of  its  obligations. 

The  first  of  civic  duties  is  that  of  endeavouring 
to  find  out — each  one  for  himself — in  what  they 
consist.  To  rely  too  confidently  upon  the  opinion 
of  others  is  to  depend  upon  the  accident  of  en- 
vironment and  association.  Engaged  as  we  are 
in  what  is  called  self-government  but  really  in 
the  government  of  one  another,  it  is  of  the  first 
importance,  no  less  from  altruistic  than  from  self- 
regarding  considerations,  that  each  shall  under- 
stand just  what  he  is  doing  as  well  as  by  what 
warrant  he  does  it.  Nor  is  this  primary  duty  of 
the  citizen  so  difficult  as  may  be  supposed.  If  the 
principles  of  government  were  hard  to  understand, 
if  they  were  indeed  beyond  the  comprehension  of 
people  in  general,  there  would  be  no  just  warrant 
for  the  maxim  that  every  man  is  presumed  to 
know  the  law,  and  little  of  promise  would  there 
be  in  government  by  the  people. 

Propositions  hereinafter  advanced  are  assumed 
to  be  statements  of  self-evident  truth  or  of  logical 
deduction  therefrom,  and  are  hence  submitted  for 


Society  and  the  State  29 

the  most  part  without  argument  or  citation  of 
authority.  If  a  proposition  seems  to  be  untrue  or 
unreasonable  the  reader  will  be  slow  to  accept  it 
on  whatever  authority,  but  before  rejecting  it  he 
should  be  quite  sure  that  he  understands  its  mean- 
ing, which  if  at  first  obscure  may  become  clear  in 
the  light  of  subsequent  statement. 

In  order  to  understand  what  the  State  actually 
is,  in  what  its  authority  consists,  what  its  legiti- 
mate functions  are,  as  well  as  what  constitutes 
abuse  of  its  power,  we  must  know  in  what  way, 
for  what  purpose,  and  by  what  just  warrant  it  is 
established  and  maintained.  The  State  is  not  to 
be  confounded  with  Society.  The  two  associa- 
tions comprise  the  same  individual  membership 
and  occupy  one  and  the  same  territory,  but  they 
are  not  identical. 

By  Society  is  meant  that  natural,  uncontrived 
association  into  which  mankind  are  unconsciously 
brought  and  in  which  they  are  ever  held  by  im- 
mutable conditions  of  a  common  existence  upon 
the  earth.  Society  as  such  has  no  organisation, 
no  common  will  or  concert  of  action,  no  legisla- 
tures nor  courts  of  justice,  no  authority  and  no 
persons  in  authority  over  it,  no  duties  and  no  laws 
other  than  those  imposed  upon  all  human  beings 


30  The  Orthocratic  State 

alike  by  reason  of  the  relations  which  they  natu- 
rally sustain  to  one  another  and  to  the  earth.  Its 
members  as  such  act  individually  or  in  volunta- 
rily associated  groups,  each  enforcing  as  judge  in 
his  own  case  as  best  he  may  whatever  judgment 
he  wills.  Society  has  no  welfare  other  than  that 
of  the  individuals  composing  it,  and  can  not  be 
wronged  except  as  they  wrong  one  another,  which 
they  may  do  as  members  of  Society  merely,  or  as 
members  of  the  State  and  through  its  agency,  that 
is,  through  government. 

The  State,  on  the  other  hand,  is  an  artificial, 
organised  association  formed  by  the  power  and 
according  to  the  will  of  man.  The  members  of 
Society  are  by  that  power  alone  compelled  to  be- 
come and  remain  members  also  of  the  State,  and  to 
conform  to  its  regulations.  The  State  formulates, 
promulgates  and  enforces  laws  or  rules  for  the 
guidance  of  its  members  in  their  conduct  toward 
one  another,  and  also  performs  all  services  of  a 
public  nature,  that  is,  such  as  are  necessary  to  an 
equitable  public  order  and  can  not  be  performed 
without  public,  or  civil,  authority.  The  State 
does  not  subvert  or  supersede  Society,  but  coexists 
with  that  pre-existent,  indissoluble  association  of 
mankind,  to  whose  irrepealable  laws  they  are  no 


Society  and  the  State  31 

less  subject  as  citizens  or  members  of  the  State 
than  as  members  of  Society. 

The  State  has  to  do  with  conduct.  Its  object 
is  to  control  conduct.  All  its  deliberations  and 
acts  are  directed  to  that  end.  It  prescribes  this 
and  prohibits  that  particular  conduct,  resorting 
to  force  when  necessary  to  compel  obedience  to  its 
commands.  Moreover,  since  no  act  of  the  State 
can  be  more  or  other  than  that  of  individuals  com- 
posing it,  its  will  being  but  the  will  of  man  and 
its  power  but  human,  government  itself,  the  ac- 
tion of  the  State,  is  always  conduct,  the  conduct 
of  man  toward  man. 

It  follows  that  conduct  must  constitute  the  sub- 
ject-matter of  a  science  of  government,  and  that 
all  questions  regarding  the  State,  whether  they 
relate  to  its  organisation  and  maintenance,  to  the 
nature,  purpose  and  extent  of  its  authority,  or 
to  exercise  of  its  power,  are  to  be  considered  and 
answered  with  reference  to  principles  of  human 
conduct. 

The  justice  of  any  first  step  toward  organisa- 
tion of  the  State  or  the  establishment  of  govern- 
ment, must  of  necessity  depend  upon  principles 
existing  at  the  time  the  step  is  taken,  and  no  tak- 
ing of  such  step  or  of  the  greatest  number  of  sub- 


32  The  Orthocratic  State 

sequent  steps,  can  change  those  principles  or  create 
new  ones.  It  is,  therefore,  upon  principles  exist- 
ing in  the  nature  of  things,  upon  the  natural  laws 
of  Society,  that  the  State  must  depend  for  what- 
ever warrant  there  may  be  for  its  existence  or  for 
exercise  of  its  power.  In  other  words,  the  rela- 
tions which  men  by  the  nature  of  their  being  sus- 
tain to  one  another  and  to  the  earth  and  upon 
whose  integrity  they  depend  for  the  preservation 
and  normal  development  of  that  being,  precede 
any  organisation  of  the  State,  and  no  action  of  the 
State,  no  government  however  long  continued,  can 
change  those  relations  or  relieve  any  human  being 
from  the  obligations  which  they  impose  upon 
every  member  of  Society.  But  for  such  obliga- 
tions and  the  possibility  of  their  disregard,  there 
would  be  no  criterion  by  which  to  judge  the  con- 
duct of  man  toward  man,  no  principles  by  which 
to  be  guided  in  any  individual  or  collective  at- 
tempt to  control  it;  in  short,  no  just  warrant  or 
authority  for  forcible  interference  with  human 
conduct,  whether  by  government  or  otherwise. 

It  follows  that  inquiry  into  the  nature  and  func- 
tions of  the  State  involves  consideration  of  the 
principles  by  which  men  should  be  guided  in  their 
conduct  toward  one  another  as  members  of  Society, 


Society  and  the  State  83 

that  natural,  unorganised  association,  which,  as 
already  seen,  precedes  and  must  be  distinguished 
from  the  artificial  organisation  comprising  the 
same  individual  membership  and  known  as  the 
State. 

Principles  of  conduct  as  between  man  and  man 
are  merely  general  rules  of  action  which  it  is  the 
duty  of  human  beings  to  observe  toward  one  an- 
other. A  duty  always  implies  something  due  or 
owed  from  or  by  one  person  to  another,  but  it  is 
evident  that  if  one  owes  anything  to  another  it  is 
because  the  latter  may  demand  it  as  a  right,  and 
that  there  can  be  no  duty  without  a  correlative 
right.  It  necessarily  follows  that  principles  of 
duty  as  between  man  and  man,  the  natural  laws 
of  human  conduct,  depend  upon  certain  no  less 
natural  rights  of  man. 

The  natural  rights  of  man,  which  are  indeed  his 
only  rights,  are  not,  as  they  are  sometimes  slight- 
ingly characterised,  mere  metaphysical  concep- 
tions, visionary  conceits  of  the  imagination,  but 
actual,  necessary  physical  conditions  of  normal 
human  existence,  as  easily  perceptible  to  the 
bodily  senses  as  any  most  palpable  entities.  We 
take  cognisance  of  them  whenever  we  say  of  any 
man,  as  we  often  instinctively  do,  that  he  is  "all 


34  The  Orthocratic  State 

right,"  meaning  thereby  that  the  conditions  in 
mind  have  not  been  impaired.  To  doubt  the 
reality  of  such  natural  conditions,  or  to  question 
the  propriety  of  calling  them  rights,  is  the  hyper- 
metaphysical  illusion  against  which  to  guard,  for 
they  constitute  the  only  demonstrable  basis  for  a 
standard  of  right  and  wrong  as  between  man  and 
man.  Without  rights,  men  could  not  wrong  one 
another. 

Natural,  human  rights  consist  in  the  essential 
relations  of  man  to  the  earth  and  to  his  fellow 
men,  and  have  their  sanction  in  the  universal  in- 
stinct of  self-preservation.  They  are  to  a  science 
of  conduct,  and  hence  to  a  science  of  government, 
what  the  axioms  of  mathematics  are  to  a  science 
of  quantity.  If  man  had  no  natural  rights  he 
could  not  have  any  rights  whatever,  for  he  would 
have  no  right  to  acquire  or  possess  any.  If  he  had 
no  natural  rights,  he  would  have  no  right  to  es- 
tablish the  State,  and  whatever  government  he 
might  maintain,  being  without  natural,  human 
right,  would  of  necessity  be  either  by  supernatural, 
divine  right,  or  without  any  right  whatever. 

A  right,  as  commonly  understood  and  defined, 
is  that,  whatever  it  may  be,  to  which  one  is  justly 
entitled,  and  if  it  exists  in  the  nature  of  things 


Society  and  the  State  35 

it  may  well  be  termed  a  natural  right.  The 
natural  condition  or  physical  relation  of  being 
alive  would  surely  seem  to  be  one  which  every 
human  being  is  entitled  to  maintain  as  against  the 
effort  or  intent  of  any  other  to  deprive  him  of  it. 
Certain  it  is  that  if  the  validity  of  any  man's  title 
to  life  is  to  be  contested  the  burden  devolves  upon 
those  who  dispute  it  and  who  in  order  to  prevail 
must  show  better  title  than  his.  But  what  title 
to  the  life  of  another  shall  they  assert  who,  by 
denying  the  existence  of  natural  rights,  virtually 
disclaim  any  right  or  title  to  their  own?  The 
right  to  life  is  not  only  natural  but  inherent  and 
inalienable,  it  being  impossible  to  conceive  of  its 
transfer,  or  of  any  man's  becoming  possessed  of  or 
entitled  to  the  life  of  another. 

Moreover,  since  that  would  be  a  right  in  name 
only  which  did  not  involve  and  carry  with  it  the 
right  of  enjoyment,  it  follows  that  if  man  has  a 
right  to  life  he  must  also  have  the  right  to  enjoy 
whatever  nature  has  established  or  provided  for 
the  support  or  happiness  of  life,  that  is,  freedom 
from  interference  by  any  other  man  or  men  with 
his  enjoyment  of  whatever  has  been  so  established 
or  provided.  Man's  right  to  maintain  his  natural 
relation  to  the  earth  and  to  his  fellow  men,  as 


36  The  Orthocratic  State 

against  the  effort  of  any  other  to  deprive  him  of 
such  freedom,  is  called  the  right  to  liberty,  which 
being  essential  to  the  inalienable  right  to  life  is 
therefore  itself  inalienable. 

As  the  right  to  life  involves  the  right  to  liberty, 
so  does  the  latter  right  include  among  others  cer- 
tain relations  of  such  importance  as  to  be  them- 
selves also  denominated  rights  although  included 
in  the  right  to  liberty.  The  relation  of  owner- 
ship which  naturally  obtains  between  every  human 
being  and  the  direct  or  indirect  product  of  his 
labour  is  called  the  right  of  property,  that  is, 
the  right  of  proprietorship  and  control  over  such 
product,  which  is  itself  termed  his  property,  or 
wealth.  The  relation  which  one  naturally  sus- 
tains to  his  fellow  men  with  respect  to  the  ex- 
change of  labour  or  property  is  called  the  right  of 
contract,  which  includes  the  natural  freedom  of 
every  human  being  to  exchange  his  labour  or  prop- 
erty for  the  labour  or  labour-products  of  any 
and  every  other  willing  to  make  the  exchange,  in 
the  natural  market,  a  market  consisting  in  the  un- 
restricted competition  of  unprivileged  natural 
persons  only. 

It  is  of  course  understood  that  the  right  to  life 
includes  security  from  bodily  harm,  and  that  the 


Society  and  the  State  87 

right  to  liberty  embraces  not  only  freedom  from 
physical  restraint,  from  manacles,  fetters  and 
prison  walls,  but  freedom  of  location  and  of  loco- 
motion, that  is,  the  freedom  of  every  human  being 
to  be  and  to  go  wherever  he  will,  as  well  as  free- 
dom to  embrace  and  enjoy  whatever  opportuni- 
ties nature  affords  for  the  support  and  happiness 
of  life,  and  to  make  whatever  use  of  them  seems 
to  him  best,  provided  always  that  he  does  not  in- 
terfere with  the  equal  freedom  of  any  other  human 
being;  also  freedom  of  thought,  speech  and  action, 
from  verbal  abuse  and  from  injury  to  reputation. 
Clearer  conception  of  what  is  meant  by  a 
natural  right  may  perhaps  be  had  by  conceiving  of 
a  man  alone  upon  the  earth.  He  would  depend 
for  existence  upon  his  ability  to  utilise  natural  op- 
portunities for  the  support  of  life,  but  his  natural 
freedom  of  action  would  hardly  occur  to  him  as  a 
right,  for  there  would  be  no  one  to  question  it  or 
against  whom  to  assert  it.  Upon  the  coming  of 
never  so  many  other  men  there  would  be  no 
change  in  the  first  man's  relation  to  the  earth  and 
no  less  necessity  for  freedom  of  action  on  his  part, 
nor  would  their  relation  to  the  earth  or  their  de- 
pendence upon  individual  freedom  of  action  be 
different  from  his.     And  even  then  not  until  some 


38  The  Orthocratic  State 

one  or  more  of  them  interfered  with  the  freedom 
of  some  other  would  it  be  conceived  of  as  a  right. 
The  first  conception  would  perhaps  be  that  of  an 
injury  or  wrong  suffered  by  reason  of  such  inter- 
ference. It  is  not  possible,  however,  to  conceive 
of  a  wrong  without  a  correlative  right.  One  is 
wronged  only  when  something  to  which  he  is 
justly  entitled  is  as  it  were  wrung  from  him.  But 
for  one  to  deprive  another  of  life,  or  of  any  condi- 
tion, relation  or  opportunity  natural  to  its  preser- 
vation or  enjoyment,  is  to  wrong  the  latter,  that  is, 
to  wring  from  him  that  to  which  he  is  justly  en- 
titled as  against  effort  of  the  former  to  deprive  him 
of  it,  and  which  may  therefore  in  the  ordinary 
use  of  the  word  be  termed  a  right,  and,  because 
existing  in  the  nature  of  things,  a  natural  right. 
In  the  exercise  and  enjoyment  of  his  natural 
rights,  it  is  evident  that  every  man  is  primarily 
dependent  upon  his  own  judgment.  His  physical 
powers  are  naturally  the  servitors  of  his  own  mind 
and  not  of  the  will  of  any  other  man.  Alone 
upon  the  earth  he  must  of  necessity  be  guided  by 
his  own  understanding,  nor  is  there  any  reason  in 
the  nature  of  things  why  after  the  coming  of  an- 
other man  either  of  them  should  abandon  his  own 
judgment  or  submit  his  conduct  to  control  of  the 


Society  and  the  State  39 

other,  so  long  as  neither  interferes  with  the  natural 
autonomy  of  the  other.  Attempt  by  one  forcibly 
to  control  conduct  of  the  other,  might  show  which 
was  for  the  time  the  stronger  or  more  crafty,  but 
could  in  no  event  determine  anything  as  to  right- 
ness  of  conduct. 

It  is  therefore  clear  that  the  fundamental,  uni- 
versal principle  of  human  conduct,  the  general 
rule  by  which  mankind  should  be  guided  in  all 
their  actions  affecting  one  another,  is  simply  this: 
— that  no  human  being  should  interfere  with  or 
infringe  upon  any  natural  right  of  another.  It  is 
also  clear  that  so  long  as  a  man  observes  this  rule 
his  conduct  can  not  justly  be  subjected  to  forcible 
control  by  any  other  man. 

It  is  no  less  clear,  however,  that,  whenever  one 
man,  disregarding  this  rule,  attempts  to  interfere 
with  another's  enjoyment  of  any  natural  right, 
the  latter  may  justly  defend  himself  against  such 
aggression,  for  the  former  has  no  right  so  to  in- 
terfere and  therefore  is  not  wronged  by  being  even 
forcibly  prevented. 

The  right  to  defend  one's  self  is  natural,  as  all 
rights  indeed  are,  but  it  is  secondary  or  subsidiary 
in  that  it  never  arises  or  comes  into  play  except 
when  necessary  to  prevent  infringement  of  some 


40  The  Orthocratic  State 

one  or  more  of  the  rights  of  life,  liberty,  property 
and  contract,  which  may  for  distinction  be  termed 
primary  natural  rights.  This  subsidiary  natural 
right,  known  as  the  right  of  self-defence,  is  called 
the  first  law  of  nature,  and  is  indeed  the  first  and 
only  law  or  principle  by  virtue  of  which  any  one 
man  can  justly  exercise  forcible  control  over  con- 
duct of  another. 

Inquiry  may  next  be  made  as  to  whether  several 
or  any  greatest  number  of  men  acting  collectively 
for  forcible  control  of  conduct  are  to  be  guided  by 
the  same  principle  as  when  acting  individually 
and  independently  of  one  another,  or  whether 
with  increase  in  the  number  of  those  undertaking 
such  control  there  arise  additional  or  modified 
principles  or  rules  of  action  in  that  regard. 

It  has  been  seen  that  of  two  men,  one,  the  sec- 
ond for  instance,  has  no  right  to  interfere  with 
conduct  of  the  first  except  in  self-defence;  nor  can 
he  have  other  or  greater  right  simply  by  reason  of 
the  presence  or  co-operation  of  a  third  man.  Since 
neither  the  second  nor  third  has  any  right  of  con- 
trol over  the  first  except  in  self-defence,  they  can 
not  both  together  have  any  except  in  defence  of 
one  or  both  of  them.  If  the  first  infringes  any 
right  of  either  the  second  or  third  they  may  justly 


Society  and  the  State  41 

co-operate  to  prevent  such  aggression,  but  so  long 
as  he  does  not  attempt  so  to  infringe  they  are  each 
in  duty  bound  not  to  interfere  with  his  conduct. 
Let  the  number  of  men  be  increased  to  whatever 
extent,  so  long  as  the  first  infringes  no  natural 
right  of  any  one  of  the  others,  they  can  not  col- 
lectively or  all  together  have  any  right  to  interfere 
with  or  forcibly  to  control  his  conduct. 

The  only  just  warrant,  then,  for  either  indi- 
vidual or  collective  action  for  forcible  control  of 
any  man's  conduct,  is  the  natural,  individual 
right  of  self-defence,  which  arises  only  upon  in- 
fringement of  some  primary  natural  right,  and 
may  then  be  exercised  as  justly  by  one  over  many 
as  by  them  over  him,  the  right  of  control  depend- 
ing in  no  way  or  degree  upon  the  number  of  those 
assuming  to  exercise  it,  but  solely  upon  the  indi- 
vidual self-defensive  right  of  some  one  or  more 
of  them. 

It  follows  that  the  right  to  govern,  the  author- 
ity to  establish  the  State,  and  to  maintain  and 
exercise  civil  power,  is  and  can  be  nothing  more 
or  other  than  the  natural,  individual  right  of  self- 
defence;  and  it  remains  to  inquire  through  what 
exercise  of  that  right  it  is  that  all  persons,  even 
those  not  interfering  with  any  natural  right  of 


42  The  Orthocratic  State 

anybody  and  perhaps  not  caring  themselves  to  re- 
sist aggression,  may  be  compelled  to  unite  with 
others  in  support  of  government. 

If  the  State  were  a  wholly  voluntary  associa- 
tion which  one  might  enter  and  leave  at  will,  war- 
rant for  its  existence  would  not  be  hard  to  find, 
for  it  is  clear  that  all  the  members  of  Society 
would  have  the  right  voluntarily  to  unite  and  co- 
operate for  the  defence  of  each  and  all  against 
the  fraud  or  violence  of  any.  Some  such  unani- 
mous action  is  implied  in  the  theory  that  govern- 
ment is  founded  on  social  contract,  but  no  such 
action  has  ever  been  taken.  Question  as  to 
whether  they  preferred  to  maintain  or  to  do  en- 
tirely without  government  was  never  yet  sub- 
mitted to  all  the  people  of  any  considerable  ter- 
ritory, and  there  are  those  who  contend  that  there 
ought  not  to  be  any  government  by  force,  and 
who  have  never  voluntarily  consented  to  any. 
The  State  is  essentially  a  compulsory  association 
of  which  all  the  people  within  the  territory  of  its 
jurisdiction  are  forced  to  become  and  remain  sup- 
porting members,  however  much  against  their  in- 
clination; and,  as  already  seen,  the  question  first 
to  be  answered  is: — By  what  just  warrant  can 
any  man  be  compelled  by  others  to  unite  with 


Society  and  the  State  43 

them  in  support  of  the  State  and  in  the  exercise 
of  its  power? 

If  the  ultimate  object  or  moving  purpose  in 
organising  the  State  were  to  protect  individuals 
from  the  fraud  or  violence,  the  intentional  ag- 
gressions of  other  individuals,  no  number  of  men, 
no  majority  however  great,  would  have  any  right 
or  authority  to  compel  any  man  to  co-operate  with 
them  to  that  end.  Their  only  right  to  combine 
for  such  purpose  would  consist  in  the  individual 
right  of  self-defence,  a  right,  however,  which  be- 
longs to  him  as  well  as  to  them,  and  by  virtue  of 
which  he  might  well  decline  so  to  co-operate,  on 
the  ground  that  according  to  his  judgment  he 
could  thereby  best  defend  himself.  In  other 
words,  any  man  in  the  exercise  of  his  right  of 
self-defence  may  justly  decline  aid  in  the  defence 
of  others.  Even  if  one  recognised  the  necessity 
of  combination  with  others  for  purposes  of  self- 
defence,  he  might  well  prefer  to  unite  with  an  or- 
ganisation of  his  own  choosing  if  not  of  his  own 
forming.  No  man  or  number  of  men  have  any 
right  to  dictate  to  any  man  how  he  shall  defend 
himself,  so  long  as  in  so  doing  he  does  not  infringe 
upon  any  natural  right  of  any  man. 

On  the  other  hand,  however,  if  one  man  in  de- 


44  The  Orthocratic  State 

fending  himself  against  another  thereby  inter- 
feres with  any  natural  right  of  still  another,  the 
last  may  justly  defend  himself  against  such  inter- 
ference however  unintentional;  and  it  will  be 
found  upon  further  consideration  that  it  is  the 
necessity  for  providing  efficient  defence  against 
such  interference,  against  unintentional  aggres- 
sions arising  from  individual  self-defensive  dis- 
turbance of  public  peace  and  order,  that  consti- 
tutes the  primary  and  only  just  warrant  for  the 
compulsion  essential  to  the  establishment  of  the 
State  and  the  maintenance  of  civil  power. 

In  Society  without  government  the  settlement 
of  differences  between  individuals  would  be  left 
to  those  personally  interested,  nor,  as  already 
seen,  would  the  mere  fact  that  one  or  more  were 
suffering  wrong  at  the  hands  of  others  warrant 
any  majority  in  compelling  the  smallest  minority 
to  aid  in  preventing  such  wrong.  Sooner  or  later, 
however,  it  would  be  found  that  unrestrained,  un- 
regulated exercise  of  the  right  of  self-defence  by 
everybody  is  incompatible  with  permanent  en- 
joyment of  natural  rights  by  anybody.  Disputes 
between  individuals  would  so  multiply,  con- 
tinue and  extend,  involving  neighbours  and 
neighbourhoods  in  the  resulting  strife,  that  tu- 


Society  and  the  State  45 

mult  and  riot  would  overwhelm  even  those  who 
had  no  differences  of  their  own  and  whom  no  one 
desired  to  molest  or  intended  to  disturb.  Those 
so  peaceably  disposed  and  so  averse  to  strife  as 
to  suffer  wrong  rather  than  disturb  the  peace  of 
others,  would  find  their  own  peace  destroyed  and 
their  property  and  lives  endangered  by  the  heed- 
less violence  of  contending  factions  in  whose  con- 
troversies they  had  no  personal  concern. 

It  is  clear  that  any  individual,  if  he  had  the 
power,  might  justly  defend  himself  against  such 
blind  aggressions  of  public  disorder  by  compel- 
ling all  persons  to  refrain  from  peace-disturbing 
self-defence,  provided  they  were  afforded  as  sure 
and  complete  defence  as  they  were  compelled  to 
forego  making  each  for  himself.  Nor  is  it  any 
less  clear  that  any  number  of  individuals  would 
have  the  right  voluntarily  to  unite  and  co-oper- 
ate for  the  same  self-defensive  purpose,  and  to 
organise  themselves  into  an  association  for  the 
maintenance  of  a  just  peace,  an  equitable  public 
order,  an  order  in  which  the  peaceable  enjoyment 
of  natural  rights  is  secured  to  all  persons  subject 
to  its  jurisdiction.  It  is  evident,  however,  that 
if  there  should  be  at  the  same  time  more  than  one 
organisation    attempting    forcibly    to    maintain 


46  The  Orthocratic  State 

peace  and  order  throughout  the  same  terri- 
tory, the  best  endeavours  in  that  behalf  would 
be  frustrated  by  inevitable  peace-disturbing 
conflicts  of  authority  and  power  resulting  in 
perpetual  strife,  and  that  nothing  short  of  an  or- 
ganisation exercising  exclusive  authority  over  all 
persons  within  its  territory  can  maintain  perma- 
nent peace  and  an  equitable  public  order  therein. 
Not  only  in  justice  to  those  who  obey  the 
command  to  forego  peace-disturbing  self-defence 
but  also  to  insure  obedience  to  it,  the  organisation 
issuing  it  must  provide  for  all  persons  required  to 
obey  it  as  complete  and  reliable  defence  as  they 
might  otherwise  have  made  each  for  himself;  and 
since  it  would  be  impossible  in  any  case  to  deter- 
mine how  complete  defence  might  have  been  so 
made,  it  devolves  upon  the  organisation  in  all 
cases  to  provide  the  most  complete  and  reliable 
defence  possible.  This  it  can  not  do  unless  its 
power  be  at  all  times  greater  than  any  and  all 
powers  against  which  it  may  at  any  time  have  to 
contend.  If  any  persons  within  the  territory  of 
its  jurisdiction  were  permitted  to  stand  aloof 
from  and  independent  of  the  organisation,  it 
would  be  so  much  the  weaker,  so  much  the  less 


Society  and  the  State  47 

able  to  enforce  obedience  to  its  commands,  its 
power  so  much  less  than  supreme. 

It  is  for  such  reason  only  and  upon  such  ground 
alone  that  all  the  members  of  Society  may 
justly  be  compelled  to  become  and  remain  mem- 
bers also  of  the  organisation  known  as  the  State, 
whose  primary  object  and  only  authorising  pur- 
pose is,  not  to  force  any  man  to  aid  in  the  de- 
fence of  any  other,  but  rather  to  compel  all 
persons  to  refrain  from  peace-disturbing  self- 
defence.  The  warrant  for  such  compulsion  con- 
sists not  in  the  will  or  power  of  any  majority  but 
in  the  natural  right  of  every  human  being  to  de- 
fend himself  against  the  aggressions  of  public 
disorder,  and  to  unite  with  others  in  doing  what- 
ever may  be  necessary  to  that  end,  provided  that 
they  thereby  interfere  with  no  man's  enjoyment 
of  any  primary  right,  and  that  all  are  allowed  to 
participate  equally  in  that  collective,  orderly 
exercise  of  the  subsidiary  right  of  self-defence, 
which  is  substituted  for  peace-disturbing  indi- 
vidual exercise  thereof;  in  other  words,  that  the 
peace  and  order  maintained  be  just  and  equitable. 

There  is,  then,  no  warrant  for  the  oft-repeated 
dictum  that  man  on  entering  the  State  thereby 


48  The  Orthocratic  State 

surrenders  certain  natural  rights  in  exchange  for 
the  advantages  of  citizenship.  Those  rights  are 
inalienable  and  can  not  be  surrendered.  The 
orthocratic,  or  rightly-governing,  State  restrains 
man  from  indulging  in  no  longer  necessary  self- 
defensive  disturbance  of  public  peace  and  order, 
but  deprives  him  of  nothing  to  which  he  is  enti- 
tled as  a  member  of  Society. 

It  will  be  observed  that  membership  in  the 
State,  although  compulsory,  is  nevertheless  an 
equal  membership.  Members  of  the  State  are 
not  only  all  entitled  to  unrestricted  enjoyment  of 
primary  natural  rights,  but,  since  they  all  have 
the  same  inalienable  although  subsidiary  natural 
right  to  defend  themselves,  they  are  also  all  enti- 
tled to  equal  voice  and  participation  in  that  or- 
ganised, civil  exercise  thereof  which,  for  the  sake 
of  peace  and  order  by  virtue  of  that  very  right, 
the  State  substitutes  in  place  of  its  prohibited 
individual  exercise. 

It  follows  that  the  jurisdiction  of  the  State  is 
limited  to  the  territory  inhabited  by  its  members, 
and  can  justly  be  extended  over  additional  terri- 
tory only  as  the  inhabitants  thereof  become 
citizens  of  the  State  so  enlarged,  with  an  equal 
voice  in  its  government. 


Society  and  the  State  49 

The  State  may  be  defined  as  that  organised 
association  into  which  the  people  of  a  definite 
territory  are  compulsorily  incorporated  for  the 
solely  self-defensive  purpose  of  maintaining 
peace  and  an  equitable  public  order  therein,  and 
through  whose  agency  is  effected  that  enforced 
regulation  of  human  conduct  and  affairs  which 
constitutes  civil  government. 


/       CHAPTER  III 

THE    FUNCTIONS    OF    GOVERNMENT 

"Governments  may  be  corrupted  and  public  misfor- 
tunes induced  by  the  failure  to  assume,  as  governmental, 
functions  that  properly  belong  to  government, — as  well 
as  from  interferences  by  government  in  the  proper 
sphere  of  individual  action." 

Henry  George. 

In  considering  the  functions  of  government, 
the  uses  to  which  the  power  of  the  State  may  be 
put  in  order  to  effect  the  purpose  of  its  organisa- 
tion in  no  way  affect  the  rights  of  any  indi- 
vidual or  of  the  people  as  a  whole,  except  as  it 
wisely  secures  or  ignorantly  interferes  with  their 
enjoyment.  As  citizens,  or  members  of  the 
State,  the  people  have  no  greater  or  other  right  to 
interfere  with  the  conduct  of  any  man  than  they 
have  as  members  of  Society  merely.  What  they 
gain  in  that  regard  through  organisation  of  the 
State,  is  simply  the  power  to  do  that  which  they 
individually  had  and  have  the  right  to  do  but 

50 


The  Functions  of  Government         51 

lack  the  power  of  doing,  namely,  to  maintain 
through  exercise  of  the  right  of  self-defence  the 
public  peace  and  order  necessary  to  enjoyment 
of  their  natural  rights.  It  is,  moreover,  evident 
that,  since  no  majority  can  justly  compel  any 
man  to  do  what  it  would  be  unjust  for  him  to  do 
of  his  own  volition  merely,  the  State  can  not 
justly  do  that  which  would  be  unjust  if  done  by 
an  individual  acting  of  his  own  accord  and  with- 
out civil  authority.  It  should,  however,  be  at  the 
same  time  observed  that,  because  it  may  do  noth- 
ing that  the  individual  may  not  do,  it  by  no  means 
follows  that  the  State  may  do  everything  and  all 
that  individuals  may  justly  do.  By  reason  of  the 
compulsory  method  of  its  organisation  and  sup- 
port it  can  justly  do  only  such  things  as  any  one 
of  its  members  having  the  power  might  rightly 
compel  the  others  to  do,  namely,  whatever  is  es- 
sential to  self-defensive  maintenance  of  a  just 
peace  and  an  equitable  public  order.  Distinction 
should  ever  be  made  between  civil  power  and  civil 
authority.  The  State  must  of  necessity  have  the 
power,  or  ability  to  do  much  that  it  has  and  can 
have  no  authority,  or  right  to  do. 

It  has  already  been  seen  that  in  order  to  main- 
tain a  just  peace  the  State  must  not  only  adopt 


/ 


52  The  Orthocratic  State 

such  measures  as  may  be  necessary  to  direct,  im- 
mediate preservation  of  the  peace,  but  must  also 
secure  its  members  individually  against  infringe- 
ment of  their  primary  natural  rights  by  other  in- 
dividuals, security  from  such  infringement  being 
essential  not  only  to  the  permanence  but  also  to 
the  justice  of  any  peace  maintained.  An  unjust 
peace  will  sooner  or  later  be  disturbed,  the  sooner 
the  better  for  all  concerned.  The  State  must  also 
of  necessity  perform  either  directly  or  indirectly 
all  services  of  a  public  nature,  that  is,  such  as  are 
essential  to  an  equitable  public  order  and  can  not 
be  performed  without  exercise  of  public,  or  civil 
authority.  It  must  also  do  whatever  is  necessary 
to  a  just  maintenance  of  its  own  integrity  and  su- 
preme power.  The  various  activities  necessary  to 
accomplishment  of  these  four  distinct  objects  con- 
stitute the  only  legitimate  functions  of  govern- 
ment. 

The  different  activities  of  the  State  all  have 
one  and  the  same  ultimate  and  only  authorising 
purpose,  namely,  the  maintenance  of  peace  and  an 
equitable  public  order,  but,  for  convenience  of 
treatment,  they  may  be  classified  according  to 
their  respective  direct,  immediate  objects.  Those 
activities  which  have  the  preservation  of  peace 


The  Functions  of  Government         53 

and  order  for  dieir  immediate  object,  as  well  as 
for  their  ultimate  and  only  purpose,  may  be  said 
to  constitute  the  Peace-preserving  function  of 
government;  those  whose  immediate  object  is  to 
secure  individuals  against  infringement  of  their 
natural  rights  by  other  individuals,  constitute 
what  may  be  called  the  Right-preserving  func- 
tion; those  which  have  the  performance  of  some 
public  service  for  their  immediate  purpose  belong 
to  the  Public-serving  function;  while  those  whose 
direct  object  is  to  maintain  the  integrity  and  su- 
preme power  of  the  State  itself  fall  within  the 
Self-preserving  function. 

All  the  legitimate  uses  of  civil  power  are  in- 
cluded in  the  above  named  four  and  only  func- 
tions of  government.  Different  classification 
would  in  no  way  affect  the  activities  to  be  consid- 
ered. A  single  activity  may  serve  more  than  one 
governmental  purpose  and  so  fall  within  more 
than  one  of  such  functions,  but  it  can  not  be  le- 
gitimate, a  proper  exercise  of  civil  power,  unless 
it  be  necessary  to  performance  of  one  or  more  of 
them.  To  use  that  power  for  accomplishment  of 
any  other  purpose  however  desirable  is  to  abuse  it. 

In  the  discharge  of  its  first,  or  Peace-preserving 
function,  the  State  prescribes  and  enforces  regu- 


54  The  Orthocratic  State 

lations  whose  direct  and  only  object  is  to  main- 
tain peace  and  public  order.  This  function  is  ex- 
ercised largely  in  direct  and  timely  prevention  of 
peace-disturbing  self-defence,  conduct  commonly 
characterised  as  taking  the  law  into  one's  own 
hands,  that  is,  doing  for  one's  self  that  which  the 
State  for  the  sake  of  peace  and  order  undertakes 
to  do  for  him.  It  has  been  seen  that  the  State 
can  not  justly  prevent  exercise  of  any  primary 
right,  but  that  peace-disturbing  exercise  of  the 
subsidiary  right  of  self-defence  may  be  prohibited 
in  cases  where  adequate  protection  is  provided  for 
the  person  foregoing  such  exercise.  For  in- 
stance, if  property  be  stolen  or  unjustly  detained 
or  premises  be  wrongfully  occupied,  the  person 
injured  has  an  undoubted  self-defensive  right  to 
use  force  if  necessary  in  retaking  such  property  or 
possession  of  such  premises;  but  the  State  for  the 
sake  of  public  order  forbids  the  use  of  peace-dis- 
turbing force  for  such  purpose  and  subjects  who- 
ever uses  it  to  penalties  imposed  in  the  discharge 
of  its  Peace-preserving  function.  In  order, 
however,  to  insure  uniform  and  prompt  obedience 
to  its  peace-preserving  regulation  as  well  as  in 
justice  to  him  who  observes  it,  the  State  makes 
provision  for  peaceable  restoration  of  the  property 


The  Functions  of  Government         55 

or  premises  through  exercise  of  its  Right-preserv- 
ing function.  As  already  suggested,  however,  in 
case  of  direct  aggression  upon  one's  person,  prop- 
erty or  premises,  he  may  make  such  forcible  re- 
sistance as  may  be  necessary  to  that  immediate 
defence  which  from  the  circumstances  of  the  case 
the  State  is  unable  to  provide. 

The  Peace-preserving  function  is  aiso  exercised 
in  regulating  conduct  in  public  places  and  thor- 
oughfares wherever  conditions  are  such  that  lack 
of  regulation  would  result  in  public  disorder;  re- 
quiring, for  instance,  that  vehicles  shall  keep  to 
the  right  or  to  the  left,  as  the  rule  may  be,  or  that 
they  shall  avoid  certain  thoroughfares  altogether. 

Care  should  of  course  be  taken  in  the  discharge 
of  this  function,  as  well  as  of  every  other,  not  to 
interfere  with  or  infringe  upon  any  primary  natu- 
ral right,  to  the  end  that  the  peace  maintained 
may  be  always  just  and  equitable. 

The  second,  or  Right-preserving  function,  em- 
braces whatever  is  to  be  done  by  the  State  for 
direct  protection  of  individuals  from  the  aggres- 
sions, the  fraud  or  intentional  violence  of  other 
individuals.  It  is  sometimes  loosely  said  that 
Society  owes  such  protection  to  its  members.  It 
is  true  that  they  are  each  in  duty  bound  to  refrain 


56  The  Orthocratic  State 

from  aggression,  but  Society  owes  nothing  to  any- 
body, nor  does  anybody  owe  anything  to  Society, 
except  to  its  members  individually.  The  State  is 
under  obligation  to  protect  its  members  for  the 
reason  only  that  in  commanding  the  peace  it  for- 
bids them  to  protect  themselves. 

Efficient  discharge  of  this  function  requires  not 
only  a  clear  conception  of  natural  rights,  but  also 
a  ready  apprehension  of  their  infringement  as 
well  as  of  rational  methods  of  preventing  it.  No 
right  will  be  secure  unless  it  is  affirmatively  rec- 
ognised by  the  State,  and  even  when  nominal 
recognition  is  accorded  it,  a  right  will  nevertheless 
be  insecure  if  there  be  not  a  definite  and  correct 
understanding  as  to  what  constitutes  infringement 
of  it.  Moreover,  the  adoption  of  irrational 
methods  or  measures  in  attempting  to  provide  for 
the  security  of  rights  will  eventually  result  in 
greater  injustice  than  any  so  sought  to  be  pre- 
vented. Attempt  to  secure  one  right  at  the  ex- 
pense of  another  tends  not  only  to  impair  the  lat- 
ter but  also  to  vitiate  enjoyment  of  the  former. 

The  State  recognises  the  rights  of  life,  liberty, 
property  and  contract,  through  imposition  of 
deterrent  penalties  for  certain  violations  of  the 
first  three  of  them,  as  well  as  by  requiring  repa- 


The  Functions  of  Government        57 

ration  as  far  as  practicable  to  be  made  for  their 
wilful  or  negligent  infringement.  It  also  pro- 
vides for  equitable  adjustment  of  controversies 
arising  out  of  contract,  sometimes  by  enforcing 
performance,  sometimes  by  the  award  of  dam- 
ages, as  well  as  by  providing  for  the  collection  of 
debts.  State  regulation  of  marriage  and  divorce 
has  its  warrant  in  the  necessity  for  securing  the 
natural  rights  of  the  persons  interested,  including 
children  of  the  parties  to  the  marriage  contract,  to 
which  the  State  is,  however,  no  more  a  party  than 
to  any  other  private  contract. 

The  State  can  not  justly  lend  its  power  to  pur- 
poses of  revenge,  retaliation  being  foreign  to  the 
functions  of  government,  which  has  properly 
nothing  to  do  with  so-called  retributive  justice. 
Penalties  imposed  by  the  State  can  have  but  one 
legitimate  object,  the  self -defensive  purpose  of 
rendering  the  enjoyment  of  natural  rights  more 
secure  than  it  would  be  without  such  penalties. 
The  penalty  most  likely  to  promote  general  se- 
curity of  those  rights  from  individual  aggression 
is  evidently  whatever  one  is  best  calculated  to 
render  all  persons,  especially  those  upon  whom  it 
is  inflicted,  less  inclined  to  aggression.  Experi- 
ence has  shown  what  reason  teaches,  that  men  are 


58  The  Ortliocratic  State 

deterred  from  crime  not  so  much  by  the  severity 
of  ultimate  punishment  as  by  the  certainty  of 
immediate  restraint.     It  is  also  known  that  brutal 
and  degrading  punishments,  not  only  fail  to  im- 
prove the  character  of  those  upon  whom  they  are 
inflicted,  but  also  tend  to  brutalise  and  degrade  a 
people  that  inflicts  them.     In  fixing  the  penalty 
for  any  offence  however  heinous,  care  should  be 
taken  not  to  subject  the  offender  to  any  treatment 
tending  to  lessen  his  or  any  other  man's  self-re- 
spect or  regard  for  the  rights  of  others.     In  all 
its  acts  the  State  should  as  by  example  endeavour 
to  strengthen  rather  than  weaken  popular  sense 
of  the  sanctity  of  human  rights,  and  ought  never 
to  countenance  the  fiction  of  their  forfeiture  to 
Society  or  to  the  State,  for  they  are  inalienable. 
Like  offences  by  whomsoever  committed  should 
be  visited  with  like  penalties.     There  should,  for 
instance,  be  no  imprisonment  of  any  for  offences 
to  be  atoned  for  by  others  in  a  different  way,  as 
by  payment  of  a  fine.     The  payment  of  money 
should  never  be  exacted  as  a  deterrent  penalty, 
but  only  in  reparation  for  an  injury  or  in  satis- 
faction of  a  just  claim.     The  luxury  of  disobey- 
ing the  law  should  be  beyond  the  means  of  any 
citizen  however  wealthy.     Reparation  for  an  in- 


The  Functions  of  Government         59 

jury  incident  to  a  criminal  offence  should  always 
be  separate  and  distinct  from  any  deterrent  pen- 
alty imposed,  and  the  damages  awarded  should  be 
collected  like  any  other  indebtedness.  Provision 
for  the  collection  of  debts  that  the  debtor  is  able 
but  unwilling  to  pay,  has  its  warrant  if  any  in 
the  rights  of  property  and  contract.  If  two  men 
enter  into  a  contract,  and  one  of  them  after  re- 
ceiving value  thereunder  refuses  to  perform  his 
part  of  the  contract,  he  is  of  course  justly  indebted 
to  the  other,  who  has  a  natural  right  to  recover 
from  him,  if  he  has  it,  the  value  so  received.  The 
State,  however,  for  the  sake  of  peace  forbids  dis- 
orderly recovery  and  is  therefore  in  justice  bound 
to  provide  for  peaceable  restitution,  the  object 
being,  not  to  insure  any  one  against  the  ordinary, 
voluntarily  assumed  hazards  of  trade,  but  to  com- 
pel payment  whenever  refusal  to  pay  evidences 
the  intentional  wrong  of  withholding  that  which 
belongs  to  another. 

The  activities  of  the  first  and  second  functions 
of  government  are  seen  to  be  of  a  somewhat  nega- 
tive and  restrictive  character,  their  immediate  pur- 
pose being  to  prevent  interference  with  the  enjoy- 
ment of  natural  rights.  Those  of  the  third,  or 
Public-serving  function,  on  the  other  hand,  will 


60  The  Orthocratic  State 

be  found  to  have  the  more  constructive  purpose 
of  providing  facilities  for  such  enjoyment,  their 
direct  object  being  to  render  positively  helpful 
services,  necessary  to  an  equitable  public  order,  but 
exceeding  the  compass  of  unprivileged  private  en- 
terprise, such  services  being  termed  public  in  con- 
tradistinction to  such  as  can  be  rendered  by 
private  persons  without  civil  authority.  All 
human  services  and  functions  are  in  the  nature  of 
things  either  private  or  public ;  that  is,  they  either 
can  or  can  not  be  performed  by  unprivileged 
natural  persons.  There  are  no  quasi-public  func- 
tions. 

The  performance  of  private  services  can  not  be 
undertaken  by  the  State  without  thereby  unjustly 
interfering  with  the  natural  right  of  individuals 
to  render  them.  By  virtue  of  the  right  of  con- 
tract every  human  being  is  entitled  to  a  natural 
market  in  which  to  offer  whatever  services  he  may 
be  able  to  render  his  fellow  men.  It  is  mainly 
through  exchange  of  such  services  that  the  labour- 
made  necessities  and  comforts  of  life  are  pro- 
duced and  enjoyed.  If  the  State  were  to  enter 
the  competitive  field  the  natural  market  for  ex- 
change of  services,  and  with  it  all  economic  free- 
dom, would  be  utterly  destroyed. 


The  Functions  of  Government         61 

On  the  other  hand,  since  in  the  rendering  of 
public  services  there  is  no  natural  competition 
possible,  that  is,  since  they  can  not  be  rendered 
by  unprivileged  natural  persons,  their  perform- 
ance by  the  State  involves  no  interference 
with  natural  rights.  It  is,  however,  a  serious 
interference  with  those  rights  for  the  State  to 
farm  out  or  entrust  to  private  persons  the  per- 
formance of  any  public  service.  To  the  persons 
so  privileged  advantages  are  thereby  given  as  un- 
natural and  unjust  and  as  eagerly  sought  as  any 
arising  from  the  bestowal  of  rank  and  title,  ad- 
vantages which  can  not  be  given  to  the  few 
except  to  the  disadvantage  of  the  many.  The 
State  can  not  justly  lend  to  or  share  with  any  part 
of  the  people  any  portion  however  small  of  that 
power  which  it  holds  in  its  corporate  capacity  for 
the  common  benefit  of  all.  It  should  mind  its 
own  business  and  have  no  partners. 

The  first  in  time  and  importance  of  services 
distinctly  public  are  those  which  are  rendered  in 
regulating  the  occupancy  and  facilitating  the  use 
of  its  territory  by  the  people  of  the  State.  All 
the  members  of  Society,  by  virtue  of  their  com- 
mon relation  to  the  earth  and  of  their  equal  right 
to  liberty,   have  one  and  the  same  inalienable 


62  The  Orthocratic  State 

right  to  occupy  and  use  land  necessary  and  natu- 
ral to  their  individual  support  and  happiness,  the 
right  of  location.  Disputes  in  regard  to  the  lo- 
cation or  extent  of  holdings  for  such  purpose 
would  naturally  be  among  the  first  of  those  dis- 
turbances of  the  peace  which  render  government 
necessary.  In  order  to  maintain  peace  the  State 
must  prescribe  uniform  terms  and  conditions 
upon  which  it  undertakes  to  secure  individuals  in 
exclusive,  permanent  and  undisturbed  possession 
of  their  respective  holdings.  Those  terms  should 
of  course  be  just  and  equitable,  giving  no  man 
any  advantage  over  any  other  and  securing  to  all 
alike  their  equal,  natural,  right  to  the  earth. 
Unjust  and  most  inequitable  would  be  a  peace 
maintained  on  any  other  terms,  upon  terms,  for 
instance,  allowing  any  greater  or  less  number  of 
persons  to  appropriate  more  than  an  equitable 
share  of  the  land  or  of  its  values. 

It  is,  however,  not  in  the  nature  of  things  pos- 
sible so  to  apportion  the  territory  of  the  State 
that  all  shall  enjoy  exclusive  individual  posses- 
sion of  equal  areas  of  equally  valuable  land  or  of 
equally  valuable  holdings  of  whatever  land. 
Land  cannot  be  so  divided,  nor  can  the  enjoyment 
of  equal  rights  to  land  be  secured  by  any  mere 


The  Functions  of  Government         63 

allotment  of  It;  lands  so  differ  in  value,  some 
having  no  value  at  all,  that  they  are  not  suscepti- 
ble of  equitable  distribution  in  kind. 

Those  who  occupy  land  having  no  value,  the 
least  desirable  in  use,  enjoy  thereby  no  economic 
advantage  over  any  of  their  fellow  men,  for  such 
land  yields  no  return  beyond  the  wages  and  in- 
terest of  any  labour  and  capital  expended  upon  it, 
the  holder  realising  therefrom  only  what  he  earns. 
On  the  other  hand,  those  who  hold  valuable  land 
do  enjoy  such  advantage,  for  the  returns  from 
such  land  exceed  the  mere  wages  and  interest  of 
the  labour  and  capital  spent  upon  it,  the  excess 
being  in  proportion  to  the  value  of  the  land,  of 
which  it  is  indeed  the  cause.  To  the  extent  of 
such  excess  the  holder  of  the  land  receives  a  value 
which  he  does  not  earn,  and  which  does  not  belong 
to  him  in  particular  any  more  than  does  the  land 
from  which  it  is  derived.  The  State  by  securing 
him  in  the  exclusive  possession  and  control  of  such 
land  enables  him  not  only  to  appropriate  as  he 
should  the  values  answering  to  the  wages  and  in- 
terest of  the  labour  and  capital  expended  on  it,  but 
also  to  receive  into  his  possession  the  excess, 
or  ground  rent  arising  from  superiority  of  loca- 
tion. 


64  The  Orthocratic  State 

Bearing  in  mind  that  the  use  of  the  earth  at  any 
time  belongs  to  the  people  then  living  upon  it, 
and  that  they  are  equally  entitled  not  only  to 
occupy  and  use  it,  but  also  to  share  alike  in  the 
economic  advantages  arising  from  the  possession 
of  superior  locations,  or  valuable  land,  one  having 
as  much  right  to  such  possession  as  another,  it 
is  clear  that  land  values  are  social;  that  they  be- 
long to  no  particular  individual  or  class  of  in- 
dividuals but  to  the  people  collectively;  and  that 
the  only  way  for  all  to  enjoy  their  equal  rights 
to  land,  is  for  each  to  account  for  and  pay  over 
to  all,  to  the  public,  the  value  if  any  of  whatever 
occupancy  of  it  he  is  by  the  State  enabled  to  main- 
tain to  the  exclusion  of  others.  To  require  such 
payment  would  not  only  secure  equal  participa- 
tion by  all  in  advantages  arising  from  the  use  of 
valuable  land,  but  would  also  insure  equal  oppor- 
tunity for  all  to  occupy  and  use  land  whether 
valuable  or  not,  for  when  its  values  shall  be  no 
longer  appropriated  to  private  uses  it  will  not  be 
sought  or  held  for  speculation,  but  will  in  its  nat- 
ural and  beneficent  abundance  become  available 
for  the  equitable  occupancy  of  any  and  all  persons 
desiring  to  use  it. 

The  system  of  land-holding  maintained  by  the 


The  Functions  of  Government         65 

State  is  as  it  were  the  ground  in  which  its  other 
institutions  have  their  root  and  of  whose  elemental 
character  they  necessarily  partake,  the  injustice 
of  an  inequitable  system  being  so  broadly  funda- 
mental and  all-pervasive  that  no  public  institu- 
tion, no  governmental  function,  no  private  inter- 
est nor  personal  relation,  industrial  or  social,  can 
fail  to  be  injuriously  affected  thereby. 

Complementary  to  the  service  which  the  State 
renders  in  adopting  and  maintaining  a  system  of 
land  tenure  for  private  purposes,  is  that  of  regu- 
lating and  facilitating  public  or  common  uses  of 
land.  Every  human  being  has  not  only  a  natural 
right  to  exclusive  possession  of  land  essential  to  his 
abode  and  self -employment,  the  right  of  location, 
but  also  the  right  to  go  to  and  from  one  place  to 
another,  the  right  of  locomotion,  and  it  is  neces- 
sary to  peaceable  exercise  of  the  latter  right  as  well 
as  to  undisturbed  enjoyment  of  land  held  for  per- 
manent occupancy,  that  stretches  of  land  conven- 
ient for  the  purpose  be  set  apart  over  which  one 
may  pass  to  and  fro  without  trespassing  upon  the 
private  holdings  of  other  persons.  And  since  it 
would  be  impracticable  to  provide  a  separate  right 
of  way  for  each  and  every  individual,  the  State 
establishes  and  maintains  public  thoroughfares  for 


66  The  Orthocratic  State 

the  accommodation  of  all  in  common,  as  well  as 
places  for  public  assembly  and  recreation. 

And  not  only  is  the  establishment  and  main- 
tenance of  such  highways  a  public  service,  but  no 
less  so  is  any  and  every  necessary  service  requiring 
exclusive  or  monopolistic  use  of  a  highway,  since 
such  use  can  not  be  enjoyed  without  special  author- 
ity of  the  State.  To  this  class  of  services  belong 
the  construction  and  operation  of  railways,  of  teler 
graph  and  telephone  lines,  and  of  plants  for  gen- 
eral distribution  of  water,  light,  heat  and  power. 
The  transportation  of  passengers  and  freight  and 
the  transmission  of  intelligence,  in  so  far  as  they 
require  monopolistic  use  of  rights  of  way,  are  also 
public  services,  since  they  can  not  be  rendered 
without  special  exercise  of  the  authority  and  power 
of  the  State. 

That  the  monopolistic  use  of  a  public  highway 
or  right  of  way  for  whatever  purpose  is  a  public 
use  or  service,  appears  further  from  the  fact  that, 
whenever  the  mistake  is  made  of  farming  out  any 
such  service  and  authorising  its  performance  by 
private  persons,  the  State  finds  it  necessary  to  sup- 
plement its  authority  by  the  loan  of  its  power, 
which  it  does  by  creating  an  artificial  person,  the 
so-called  public-service  corporation.     The  State 


The  Functions  of  Government         67. 

has  no  right  to  create  artificial  persons,  or  corpora- 
tions for  any  purpose  whatever.  Such  exercise  of 
its  power  is  not  only  unnecessary  to  the  discharge 
of  any  of  its  functions,  and  therefore  prima  facie 
a  misuse  of  that  power,  but  is  also  destructive  of 
the  natural  market,  which  obtains  among  natural 
persons  only. 

Further  indication  that  such  services  are  public 
rather  than  private  is  to  be  seen  in  the  necessity 
for  State  regulation  of  the  charges,  if  any,  to  be 
made  therefor,  no  such  necessity  ever  existing  in 
case  of  private  services  so  long  as  rendered  by  un- 
privileged natural  persons.  The  only  way  of  as- 
certaining the  just  price  of  any  service  or  commod- 
ity is  through  competition  in  a  natural  market. 
Such  competition  being  impossible  in  the  case  of 
public  services,  which  are  necessarily  and  naturally 
monopolistic,  there  is  no  way  justly  to  determine 
the  price  to  be  paid  for  their  performance  by  pri- 
vate persons.  If  a  charge  is  to  be  made  for  their 
performance  by  the  State,  it  should  of  course  not 
exceed  the  cost  of  the  service,  any  greater  charge 
so  made  being  an  arbitrary  and  unjust  tax,  as  it 
also  is,  in  so  far  as  the  State  is  concerned,  when 
exacted  by  a  public-service  corporation. 

Argument  that  this  or  that  public  service  can  be 


68  The  Orthocratic  State 

rendered  by  private  enterprise  at  a  less  cost  than 
by  the  State,  is  not  to  the  point.  The  State  should 
mind  its  own  business.  It  might  entrust  to  the 
lowest  bidder  the  discharge  of  all  its  functions  to- 
gether with  the  authority  and  power  necessary  to 
their  performance,  but  there  would  be  no  just  war- 
rant for  such  delegation  of  its  authority  or  power, 
nor  is  there  any  better  reason  for  farming  out  some 
of  its  activities,  those  that  the  farmers-general  find 
profitable,  than  for  placing  them  all  in  private 
hands.  The  State  is  not  organised  to  make  or 
even  to  save  money,  nor  to  make  anything  cheap, 
nor  to  provide  opportunities  for  the  investment  of 
capital  or  the  employment  of  labour,  but  rather  to 
maintain  an  equitable  public  order  in  which 
natural  opportunities  for  the  employment  of 
labour  and  capital  shall  be  equally  open  to  all. 
The  power  which  it  forcibly  assumes  for  that  sole 
and  only  authorising  purpose  can  not  justly  be 
granted  or  loaned  for  any  purpose  whatever. 

Objection  to  direct  performance  of  all  its  func- 
tions by  the  State  itself,  on  the  ground  that  the 
number  of  public  servants  and  the  power  of  pat- 
ronage would  be  thereby  increased,  might  as  well 
be  made  to  any  and  all  such  servants  and  patron- 
age.    There  would  seem  to  be  no  stronger  argu- 


The  Functions  of  Government         69 

ment  in  support  of  the  theory  that  government  is 
unnecessary  and  therefore  unjust,  than  that  sug- 
gested by  government  itself,  when  it  practically 
concedes  that  some  of  its  most  important  functions 
can  be  better  performed  by  private  persons  than 
by  the  State.  The  seeming  force  of  the  argument 
of  course  disappears  when  it  is  considered  that  in 
no  instance  can  a  really  public  service  be  rendered 
without  authority  and  power  derived  from  the 
State.  Not  only  is  that  authority  essential  to  the 
monopolistic  control  necessary  to  such  service,  but 
the  public-service  corporation,  now  so-called,  is, 
as  it  was  formerly  wont  to  be  termed,  an  arm  of 
the  State,  without  whose  aid  the  service  could  not 
be  rendered  by  private  enterprise.  Evils  to  be  ap- 
prehended from  direct  exercise  of  its  power  by  the 
State  can  not  be  greater  than  those  arising  from  the 
grant  or  loan  of  it  to  private  persons.  The 
former,  moreover,  can  be  overcome  by  efficient 
government,  but  evils  of  the  latter  class  will  in- 
evitably persist  in  spite  of  all  that  government  can 
do,  so  long  as  it  continues  their  causal  abuse. 

Another  important  public  service  is  that  of  pro- 
viding a  circulating  medium  of  exchange.  In  or- 
der to  maintain  itself  and  perform  its  other  func- 
tions, the  State  calls  upon  individuals  for  com- 


70  The  Orthocratic  State 

modities  and  services  for  which  it  pays  value  for 
value,  expending  for  that  purpose  the  public  rev- 
enue which  it  collects  from  the  people.  Since 
neither  payment  for  such  commodities  and  services 
nor  collection  of  such  revenue  can  be  effected 
through  barter,  the  State  adopts  some  more  or  less 
convenient  medium  of  exchange  to  be  accepted  by 
individuals  in  payment  of  claims  against  the  State, 
and  also  by  the  State  in  payment  of  its  revenue. 
In  order  that  it  may  be  the  more  readily  accepted, 
and  also  that  it  may  be  of  service  in  the  judicial 
settlement  of  disputes  between  individuals,  the 
State  provides  that  it  shall  be  recognised  as  a  meas- 
ure of  values  and  be  receivable  throughout  the 
State  in  payment  of  all  dues  public  and  private, 
making  it  a  legal-tender  currency.  This,  like  any 
other  public  service,  should  be  performed  by  the 
State  itself  without  intervention  of  private  per- 
sons, natural  or  artificial,  to  the  end  that  it  may  be 
just  and  equitable,  affording  no  man  any  advan- 
tage over  any  other. 

In  the  discharge  of  its  Public-serving  function, 
the  State  should  also  make  whatever  equitable 
general  regulations  may  be  necessary  to  protect  the 
public  against  false  weights  and  measures,  impure 
foods,  dangerous  employments,  unsanitary  hous- 


The  Functions  of  Government         71 

ing,  fire,  communicable  disease,  and  any  other  evils 
against  which  the  individual  can  not  effectually 
guard,  or,  at  least,  not  without  disturbance  of  the 
peace.  Much  of  present  necessity  for  such  regula- 
tions, including  regulation  of  the  hours  of  labour 
for  men,  women  and  children,  as  well  as  provision 
for  support  of  the  disemployed,  will,  however,  dis- 
appear when  natural  opportunities  for  existence 
are  secured  to  all,  as  they  will  be  whenever  the 
State,  instead  of  making  needless,  ever-increasing 
and  seemingly  endless  work  for  itself,  shall  limit 
the  use  of  its  power  to  efficient  discharge  of  its 
legitimate  functions. 

The  fourth,  or  Self -preserving  function  of  gov- 
ernment, embraces  whatever  has  to  be  done  by  the 
State  to  maintain  its  integrity  and  supreme  power, 
including  whatever  is  necessary  to  its  defence 
against  insurrection  from  within  or  invasion  from 
without.  The  surest  defence  against  each  of  these 
dangers  is  to  be  found  in  a  just  and  equitable  ad- 
ministration by  the  State  of  its  own  affairs,  which 
necessarily  precludes  any  intermeddling  with  the 
affairs  of  other  States.  There  can  be  little  danger 
of  dissension  within  a  State  where  the  enjoyment 
of  natural  rights  is  secured  to  all.  It  should  be 
observed,  moreover,  that  the  State  is  organised  to 


72  The  Ortliocratic  State 

secure  that  enjoyment  within  its  own  territory 
only,  and  has  no  legitimate  concern  in  what  may 
be  done  within  or  by  other  States,  so  long  as  its 
own  peace  is  not  necessarily  disturbed  thereby. 
If  citizens  of  one  State  elect  to  invest  their  capital 
in  territory  of  another  or  to  lend  it  to  another 
State,  they  can  justly  look  for  protection  in  their 
venture  only  to  the  State  in  which  they  have 
chosen  to  make  it.  The  best  and  only  legitimate 
way  for  a  State  to  promote  just  government 
abroad  is  to  maintain  it  at  home,  affording  the 
oppressed  of  other  States  an  asylum  within  its 
own  territory.  The  State  that  really  does  this 
need  fear  no  invasion,  for  it  will  grow  stronger  as 
others  become  weaker,  by  reason  of  the  immigra- 
tion it  invites,  and  its  example  will  sooner  or 
later  be  followed  by  other  States,  if  merely  to 
keep  their  people  at  home,  for  it  is  only  through 
exploitation  of  the  many  that  the  few  can  largely 
profit.  Landlords  might  as  well  lose  their  land 
as  to  lose  the  people  who  labour  on  it,  and  capital 
even  is  profitable  only  when  used  as  an  adjunct  to 
labour. 

It  is  in  the  discharge  of  this  function  that  the 
State  is  warranted  if  at  all  in  making  provision 
for  compulsory  education  of  its  citizens.     Such 


The  Functions  of  Government         73 

provision  is  not  necessary  to  immediate  preserva- 
tion of  the  peace;  nor  to  direct  prevention  of  the 
infringement  of  natural  rights;  nor  is  the  educa- 
tion of  the  young  a  public  service  in  the  sense  that 
it  could  not  be  performed  by  unprivileged  natural 
persons.  When  the  State  shall  efficiently  dis- 
charge its  legitimate  functions,  industrial  and  so- 
cial conditions  may  perhaps  be  such  that  the  people 
individually  in  their  private  capacity  will  as  nat- 
urally and  as  surely  make  suitable  provision  for 
the  education  of  their  children  as  for  the  feeding, 
clothing  and  sheltering  of  them.  The  only  valid 
reason  there  can  be  for  a  system  of  compulsory  ed- 
ucation by  the  State,  is  that  under  existing  condi- 
tions, for  which  the  State  itself  is  more  or  less 
responsible,  it  may  be  necessary  in  order  to  insure 
the  general  intelligence  essential  to  stability  of 
popular  government.  To  what  extent  and  to 
what  particular,  intermediate  ends  the  State 
should  for  that  purpose  assume  control  and  direc- 
tion of  opportunities  and  methods  for  education, 
is  a  question  worthy  of  more  attention  than  it 
has  yet  received.  No  majority  however  learned 
can  be  wise  enough  to  warrant  its  using  the  power 
of  government  to  mould  the  opinions,  or.  Sparta- 
like, to  shape  the  habits  of  a  people. 


74  The  Orthocratic  State 

That  the  maintenance  of  a  compulsory  system 
of  education,  however  necessary  it  may  seem  under 
existing  conditions,  is  not  a  normal  activity  of  the 
State,  appears  from  the  difficulty  encountered  in 
attempting  to  maintain  an  efficient  system  vt^ithout 
interfering  with  natural  rights  of  both  parent  and 
child.     Such  a  system  would  seem  to  require  not 
only  that  the  pupil  shall  be  in  regular,  continuous 
attendance  upon  a  more  or  less  extended  course  of 
study  calculated  to  make  him  an  intelligent  citi- 
zen, but  also  that  he  be  in  such  attendance  after 
his  mind  has  become  sufficiently  mature  to  profit 
thereby,  say,  from  twelve  or  fourteen  to  eighteen 
or  twenty  years  of  age.     It  is  evident,  however, 
that  during  those  same  years  he  must  acquire  if 
ever  the  skill  and  proficiency  essential  to  efficient 
prosecution  of  whatever  vocation  he  may  after- 
wards follow,  and  that  if  he  is  required  during 
^^  those  years  to  devote  all  his  time  to  improvement 
of  his  mind  he  must  necessarily  go  without  the 
industrial  training  essential  to  efficient  self-sup- 
port in  after  life.     Hence  it  is  that  the  State 
vainly  attempts  to  give  him  the  required  mental 
discipline  while  he  is  yet  too  young  to  profit,  and 
may  indeed  be  injured,  by  it,  dismissing  him  from 
compulsory  school  attendance  at  about  the  time  he 


The  Functions  of  Government        75 

should  begin  it,  if  its  purpose  be  to  make  him  an 
intelligent  citizen.  And  even  if  from  voluntary 
attendance  upon  a  secondary,  or  high-school  course 
of  study,  provided  for  such  as  can  afford  to  take 
it,  he  thereafter  attains  a  certain  intellectual  dis- 
cipline, it  must  be  at  the  loss  of  a  practical  busi- 
ness training. 

If  the  necessity  for  popular  education  be  so  im- 
perative as  to  warrant  the  State  in  assuming  the 
imperious  and  virtually  exclusive  control  over  the 
education  of  children  which  it  now  begins  to  exer- 
cise almost  as  soon  as  they  are  out  of  the  cradle,  it 
is  at  least  pertinent  to  ask  whether  that  so  neces- 
sary end  is  to  be  accomplished  by  such  arbitrary 
interference  with  parental  prerogatives  and  such 
prison-like  detention  of  those  whose  only  offence  is 
that  they  are  children  and  too  young  to  defend 
themselves.  The  scheme  is  too  unnatural  to  be 
lasting,  and  the  day  will  come  when  the  State,  in 
defence  of  the  child  and  in  the  interest  of  rational 
education,  will  prohibit  the  doing  of  much  that 
it  now  compels  to  be  done.  Under  its  present 
compulsory  system  of  so-called  education  the 
State  is  acting  more  as  nursery  maid  than  as  school- 
master. 

State-enforced  school  attendance  should  not  be 


76  The  Orthocratic  State 

required  of  children  until  after  they  are  at  least 
twelve  years  of  age,  and  then  for  one-half  only 
f\  of  each  day,  in  which  to  form  habits  of  thinking, 
I  the  other  half  being  left  open  to  employments  in 
\  which  to  acquire  habits  of  doing.  Let  a  student, 
from  the  time  he  is  twelve  or  fourteen  until  he  is 
•  eighteen  or  twenty  years  of  age,  give  but  one  half 
of  each  day  to  mental  effort  and  the  other  half  to 
some  industrial  pursuit,  as  long  as,  at  that  age,  he 
should  be  continuously  held  to  either  task,  resting 
alternately  in  the  one  from  fatigue  of  the  other, 
and  coming  fresh  to  each;  and  he  will  have  not 
only  a  better  intellectual  development  and  equip- 
ment than  one  who  even  from  an  earlier  age  de- 
votes the  entire  day  to  study,  but  also  a  practical 
acquaintance  with  business,  which  the  other  will 
necessarily  lack,  having  been  prevented  from  ac- 
quiring it  at  the  proper  time,  that  is,  during  the 
habit-forming  age.  The  former,  moreover,  will 
have  acquired  none  of  that  contempt  for  manual 
labour  which  continuous  exclusive  attendance  upon 
school  is  wont  to  develop  in  minds  it  is  fondly 
supposed  to  educate.  He  will  also  be  likely  to 
have  formed  lasting  habits  of  industry  both  bodily 
and  mental,  together  with  some  intelligent  idea  of 
his  own  vocational  tastes  and  capabilities.     Any 


The  Functions  of  Government         77 

educational  training  enforced  by  the  State  should 
be  the  same  for  all,  each  being  allowed  to  profit 
therefrom  according  to  his  ability,  and  that  with- 
out having  his  perhaps  more  or  less  mediocre  abil- 
ity emphasised  and  stigmatised  by  the  ostentatious 
conferring  of  invidious  and  needlessly  discrimi- 
nating honours  upon  those  who  happen  to  have 
greater  natural  ability.  Any  attempt  by  the 
State  to  prescribe  for  the  child  an  educational 
training  suited  to  some  particular  station  in  life 
officiously  assumed  to  be  his  proper  one,  would  be 
a  long  step  toward  his  exclusion  by  government 
from  any  better  station.  The  legitimate  object 
of  compulsory  education  by  the  State  is,  not  to 
educate  for  this  or  that  trade  or  profession  or  for 
any  particular  station  in  life,  but  so  to  develop  and 
train  the  mind  as  to  form  the  habit  of  correct 
thinking,  especially  in  regard  to  matters  of  gov- 
ernment, a  habit  quite  as  essential  to  good  citizen- 
ship as  that  of  saluting  the  flag,  but  demanding 
for  its  acquirement  greater  maturity  of  mind  than 
is  ordinarily  possessed  before  the  age  at  which 
most  children  now  leave  school. 

In  the  discharge  of  its  Self-preserving  function 
it  devolves  upon  the  State  to  make  equitable  pro- 
vision for  defraying  the  expenses  of  government. 


78  The  Orthocratic  State 

This  has  never  yet  been  done,  the  history  of  taxa- 
tion being  a  continued  story  of  fiscal  injustice. 
The  very  generally  accepted  doctrine  that  the  in- 
dividual should  be  taxed  according  to  his  ability 
to  pay,  is  of  course  inequitable  unless  he  owes  his 
ability  to  the  State;  nor  is  attempted  practise  of 
the  theory  any  less  iniquitous  because  those  os- 
tensibly so  taxed  generally  shift  the  burden  to 
those  having  less  ability,  with  result  that  the  peo- 
ple are  in  reality  taxed  not  so  much  according 
to  ability  to  pay  as  to  their  inability  to  avoid 
paying. 

So  unsuccessful  have  been  all  attempts  in  that 
direction  that  it  has  come  to  be  regarded  as  im- 
possible to  devise  an  equitable  system  of  taxation, 
it  being  said  that  nature  gives  no  whisper  about 
'  any  taxes.  Certain  it  is  that  there  is  not  in  the 
nature  of  things  any  principle  or  just  warrant  by 
virtue  of  which  any  man  or  majority  of  men,  any 
State,  can  forcibly  take  or  tax  from  any  man  that 
which  he  does  not  owe.  Even  if  the  State  could 
devise  some  plan  by  which  to  compel  every  man  to 
contribute  to  its  revenue  exactly  the  same  amount 
as  every  other,  it  could  in  no  case  rightly  enforce 
such  contribution  unless  it  was  for  some  reason 
due  and  owing  to  that  corporate  body;  nor  as  al- 


The  Functions  of  Government         79 

ready  suggested  can  it  justly  take  from  any  man 
more  than  from  others  simply  because  he  has  more 
than  they  have.  A  public  revenue  is  necessary 
to  the  support  of  government,  but  it  must  be  a 
just  one  if  government  is  to  be  just.  If  the  col- 
lection of  a  just  revenue  be  indeed  impracticable, 
the  Anarchists  are  right  in  their  contention  that 
all  government  by  force  is  unjust. 

The  State  is  a  self-defensive  organisation  in 
which  all  the  people  of  its  territory  are  entitled 
to  equal  membership,  whose  services  should  be  for 
the  equal  benefit  of  all,  and  for  whose  expenses  all 
are  equally  responsible  and  should  therefore  be 
equally  assessed,  if  any  assessment  be  necessary. 
More  can  not  be  justly  exacted  from  any  one 
member  than  from  others  except  in  payment  for 
some  advantage  which  the  State  enables  him  to 
enjoy  over  them,  and  then  not  as  an  assessment 
or  tax,  but  as  the  value  of  the  advantage,  for 
which  he  should  account  regardless  of  any  public 
expenses  and  of  any  assessments  therefor.  If  the 
amount  realised  from  payments  so  made  should 
prove  sufficient  to  defray  all  the  expenses  of  gov- 
ernment, it  is  clear  that  no  assessments  or  taxes 
would  be  necessary.  It  has  already  been  seen 
that  individuals  who  are  by  the  State  enabled  to 


80  The  Orthocratic  State 

enjoy  the  advantages  of  holding  valuable  land 
ought  to  account  to  the  public  for  their  values. 
When  the  State  shall  require  such  accounting  to 
be  made  and  shall  apply  all  such  values  to  public 
uses  there  will  be  no  need  of  any  taxation,  nor 
will  there  be  any  difference  in  amounts  contributed 
by  individuals  to  the  support  of  government, 
since  those  values  belong  to  the  people  in  common. 
The  distinction  between  services  that  are  public 
and  those  that  are  private  is  not  more  marked 
than  is  that  between  public  and  private  revenues. 
Land  values  constitute  the  natural  revenues  of 
the  State.  They  could  not  be  collected  or  even 
determined  without  the  action  of  government,  for 
without  it  there  would  be  neither  buyers  nor  sell- 
ers of  land,  and  so  no  market  in  which  to  deter- 
mine its  values.  The  relation  of  landlord  and 
tenant  is  neither  natural  nor  primarily  contractual 
but  institutional,  the  landlord  being  a  duly  au- 
thorised collector  of  specific  public  revenues  for 
which  he  should  duly  account. 

In  studying  the  functions  of  government  it  will 
be  observed  that  considerations  of  expediency  are 
never  of  themselves  a  sufficient  warrant  for  ex- 
ercise of  its  power;  they  are  of  weight  in  civic 
affairs  only  in  deciding  upon  the  best,  the  most 


The  Functions  of  Government         81 

rational  way  of  doing  what  justice  betwe'en  man 
and  man  requires  to  be  done.  It  is  not  the 
business  of  the  State  to  do  good,  or  to  make  any- 
body good;  to  promote  the  greatest  goo4  of  the 
greatest  number,  or,  better  still,  even  of  the  whole 
number;  to  promote  this  or  that,  be  it  industry, 
morality,  progress,  the  socially  useful,  or  whatever 
else;  for  even  if  such  ends  were  really  and 
directly  attainable  through  government,  they 
would  not,  desirable  as  they  are,  justify  the  com- 
pulsion-necessary to  its  support.  Nor  can  any 
human  conception  or  forecast  of  what  would  be 
good  or  useful  for  mankind  be  taken  as  a  guide, 
much  less  as  a  warrant,  for  civil  action.  What- 
ever the  State  may  do  toward  promotion  of  the 
good  or  the  useful  will  be  incidental  to  rational 
government,  to  the  maintenance  of  an  equitable 
order  in  which  men  shall  be  free  to  be  as  good  as 
they  like,  and  to  promote  whatever  they  will,  pro- 
vided they  do  not  interfere  with  that  order. 

The  question  whether  any  existing  or  proposed 
use  of  civil  power  is  or  would  be  legitimate,  may 
always  be  determined  by  inquiring  as  to  which 
one,  if  any,  of  the  four  functions  of  government  it 
belongs,  any  action  by  the  State  not  necessary  to 
performance  of  some  one  or  more  of  them  being 


82  The  Orthocratic  State 

wholly  unwarranted  and  an  abuse  of  its  power. 
As  its  members  become  less  and  less  disposed  to 
aggression,  as  they  will  under  more  rational  gov- 
ernment; as  fraud  and  violence  among  them  shall 
gradually  diminish,  there  will  be  less  and  less  ne- 
cessity for  exercise  of  its  Right-preserving  func- 
tion by  the  State.  There  will  doubtless  be  at  the 
same  time  an  also  resulting  diminution  in  activi- 
ties of  the  Peace-preserving  and  Self-preserving 
functions,  whose  exercise  may  eventually  be  neces- 
sary, the  one  merely  to  provide  the  orderly  direc- 
tion essential  to  the  peace  and  safety  of  public 
thoroughfares  and  assemblies,  and  the  other  to 
collection  of  the  public  revenues,  the  tendency  be- 
ing to  ultimate  disappearance  of  all  necessity  for 
punitive  or  sensibly  coercive  government.  On  the 
other  hand,  it  is  evident  that  activities  of  the 
Public-serving  function  will  increase  with  increas- 
ing necessity  for  services  of  a  public  nature,  those 
which  are  essential  to  an  equitable  public  order 
and  can  not  be  rendered  without  civil  authority; 
and  that  government  will,  for  that  reason  also, 
tend  to  become  preponderatingly  administrative 
rather  than  coercive  in  the  exercise  of  its  power. 
The  maintenance  of  its  highways,  including  its 
legalised   circulating   medium   of   exchange,    to- 


The  Functions  of  Government         83 

gether  with  any  necessarily  monopolistic  uses  of 
those  public  utilities,  will  eventually  constitute 
the  principal  activities  of  the  State,  all  private 
business,  enterprises  and  affairs  being  of  course 
left  to  the  unhampered  conduct  and  control  of 
unprivileged  private  persons  and  associations. 


/! 

ckAPTER  IV 

ABUSES    OF    CIVIL    POWER 

"So  I  returned  and  considered  all  the  oppressions  that 
are  done  under  the  sun;  and  beheld  the  tears  of  such 
as  were  oppressed,  .  .  .  and  on  the  side  of  their  op- 
pressors there  was  power." 

Book  of  Ecclesiastes. 

It  having  been  seen  what  the  State  ought  to  do, 
and  what  is  quite  as  important,  that  it  ought  not  to 
do  anything  else,  it  should  not  be  difficult  at  any 
time  to  determine  whether  it  is  in  any  way  abusing 
its  power.  There  are  three  ways  in  which  the  State 
can  abuse  its  power;  first,  by  neglecting  to  use  it 
for  a  proper  purpose ;  second,  by  using  it  in  an  im- 
proper manner  although  for  a  proper  purpose;  and 
third,  by  using  it  or  permitting  it  to  be  used  for  an 
improper  purpose.  Abuses  of  the  first  kind  are 
exceedingly  rare,  the  tendency  being  to  over-use  of 
power.  How  often  is  it  said  that  there  ought  to 
be  a  law,  for  this  or  for  that,  when  the  trouble 
really  is  that  there  already  is  too  much  law  for  this 
and  for  that.     Abuses  of  the  second  class  consist 

84 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  85 

in  the  use  of  irrational  methods  in  the  attempted 
discharge  of  legitimate  functions.  An  abuse  of 
the  third  class  occurs  whenever  civil  power  is  used 
for  any  purpose  other  than  that  of  performing  one 
or  more  of  such  functions. 

Of  the  first  kind  of  abuse  no  example  will  be 
given,  for  reason  already  suggested,  that  there  is 
hardly  any  matter  or  interest  susceptible  to  govern- 
mental interference  that  has  not  been  made  the 
subject  of  some  sort  of  prohibitive,  regulative  or 
stimulative  legislation. 

Abuses  of  the  second  class  are  to  be  seen  in  at- 
tempts made  to  perform  governmental  functions 
by  methods  involving  infringement  of  natural 
rights.  For  instance,  the  State  abuses  its  power 
whenever,  although  for  the  purpose  of  maintaining 
public  order,  it  suppresses  free  expression  of  in- 
dividual opinion,  however  unpopular  or  incorrect 
it  may  be,  lest  it  cause  disturbance  of  the  peace  by 
opponents  of  such  opinion.  No  man  can  be  pre- 
vented from  thinking  his  own  thoughts,  and 
whether  they  be  right  or  wrong  is  not  to  be  deter- 
mined by  majority  rule.  Whatever  a  man  may 
think  or  say,  he  is  not  justly  subject  to  interference 
by  any  other  man  or  by  the  State,  so  long  as  he 
infringes  no  natural  right  of  any  man.     Those 


86  The  Orthocratic  State 

who  deny  the  existence  of  natural  rights  may  in- 
deed seem  to  disclaim  any  right  to  express  or  even 
to  have  an  opinion,  but  there  can  of  course  be  no 
valid  disclaimer  of  that  which  is  inherent  and  in- 
alienable. It  is  not  any  expression  of  opinion  but 
forcible  opposition  to  its  expression  that  should  be 
prohibited  by  the  State,  in  the  exercise  not  only  of 
its  Peace-preserving  but  also  of  its  Right-preserv- 
ing function.  Freedom  of  speech  and  of  the  press 
is  essential  to  enjoyment  of  the  right  to  liberty, 
without  which  there  can  be  no  equitable  public 
order. 

A  most  irrational  and  unjust  method  of  at- 
tempting to  perform  a  legitimate  function,  that  of 
securing  the  right  to  life,  is  to  be  seen  in  what  is 
called  capital  punishment.  It  has  been  seen  that 
the  only  legitimate  purpose  of  any  penalty  im- 
posed by  the  State  is  to  provide  greater  security 
against  the  offence  for  which  it  is  imposed.  Se- 
curity against  repetition  of  the  offence  by  any 
particular  offender  can  be  provided  by  his  incar- 
ceration, nor  has  it  ever  been  demonstrated  that 
other  possible  offenders  are  to  be  deterred  more 
by  fear  of  the  death  penalty  than  by  the  more  im- 
minent and  readily  conceivable  probability  of  im- 
prisonment. 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  87 

It  is  not  easy  for  man  to  conceive  of  his  own, 
personal  mortality,  or  fully  to  realise  that  he  is 
indeed  himself  ever  to  die  even  the  death  that  he 
knows  must  sooner  or  later  come  to  all ;  much  less 
can  any  apprehension  of  a  contingency  rarely  hap- 
pening even  to  those  incurring  liability  to  it  be  so 
lively  as  to  exert  a  controlling  influence  over  his 
conduct  in  time  of  temptation.  It  is,  moreover, 
at  least  an  open  question  whether  any  deterrent  in- 
fluence the  penalty  may  have  in  general  is  not  more 
than  counterbalanced  by  its  inevitable  tendency  to 
weaken  popular  sense  of  and  regard  for  the  sanc- 
tity of  human  life. 

But  even  if  its  effects  were  known  to  be  pre- 
ponderatingly  deterrent,  infliction  of  the  death 
penalty  would  nevertheless  be  unjust  not  only  for 
the  reason  that  the  punishment  rarely  falls  so 
heavily  on  the  offender  as  upon  his  unfortunate 
but  innocent  relatives  and  friends  whom  the  State 
has  no  right  to  punish,  but  also  for  the  further 
reason  that  the  State  has  no  right  in  cold  blood  to 
take  the  life  of  any  human  being  whatever  his 
offence,  since  it  can  not  justly  do  that  which  no 
one  of  its  members  has  any  right  to  do.  No  man 
can  justly  take  the  life  of  another  except  in  de- 
fence against  actual  or  impending  aggression ;  and 


88  The  Orthocratic  State 

if  no  man  has  a  right  to  take  the  life  of  another 
simply  because  the  latter  has  taken  human  life,  no 
more  has  any  number  of  men,  any  mob  or  the 
State.  The  advocate  of  capital  punishment  neces- 
sarily assumes  that  he  has  a  right  not  only  himself 
to  take  life  otherwise  than  in  self-defence,  but  also 
to  compel  others  to  aid  him  in  so  doing.  The 
death  penalty  is  in  fact  demanded  not  so  much  to 
secure  human  life  as  to  appease  human  resentment. 

A  too  common  and  still  growing  abuse  is  that 
of  permitting  persons  charged  with  crime,  but 
entitled  to  the  presumption  of  innocence,  to  be 
treated  by  agents  of  the  State  not  merely  as  if 
presumed  to  be  guilty,  but  even  as  if  already  con- 
victed, and  judicially  sentenced  to  indignities  put 
upon  them.  To  say  nothing  of  the  injustice  of 
such  practice,  its  demoralising  influence  and  tend- 
ency to  weaken  public  confidence  in  the  rectitude 
of  government  should  be  enough  to  condemn  it. 

There  is  perhaps  no  greater  misuse  of  civil 
power  than  that  involved  in  the  prevailing  sys- 
tem of  land  tenure,  which,  by  causing  land  to  be 
held  as  by  right  of  property,  not  only  denies  the 
natural  right  of  man  to  the  earth  but  at  the  same 
time  tends  to  vitiate  the  right  of  property.  The 
latter  right,  consisting  as  it  does  in  the  relation 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  89 

which  a  man  naturally  sustains  to  the  product  of 
his  labour,  is  nugatory  and  barren  without  nat- 
ural opportunity  for  labour.  Denied  freedom  to 
enjoy  his  right  to  land,  a  man  is  deprived  of  the 
enjoyment  not  only  of  that  right  but  also  of  his 
right  to  property,  because  compelled  to  depend 
upon  unnatural  conditions,  upon  the  will  and  con- 
sent of  other  men,  for  whatever  limited  opportu- 
nity to  produce  it  they  may  see  fit  to  allow  him. 
The  right  of  property,  which  the  State  has  seemed 
more  solicitous  to  magnify,  exalt  and  extend  than 
correctly  to  define,  natural  and  sacred  as  it  is,  can 
not  be  more  so  than  is  the  right  to  land,  which  the 
State  ignores  and  virtually  denies  by  confound- 
ing it  with  the  right  of  property,  forgetting  that 
the  wild  fruit  a  man  eats  by  right  of  property 
is  gathered  only  by  virtue  of  his  right  to  land. 

The  property  right  or  relation  is  one  of  exclu- 
sive ownership  and  control  and  carries  with  it 
the  right  even  to  destroy  the  particular  property 
owned.  It  arises  from  the  effort  of  man  and  ob- 
tains only  between  him  and  the  result  of  his  effort, 
the  concrete  exchangeable  product  of  his  labour, 
that  is,  his  property,  or  wealth.  Other  things  may 
be  in  a  sense  his  own,  but  not  in  the  property  sense. 
A  footprint  may  be  his  but  not  in  the  same  sense 


90  The  Orthocratic  State 

as  the  shoe  that  made  it.  The  position  or  place 
that  he  temporarily  and  perhaps  wrongfully  oc- 
cupies in  a  crowd  is  his  as  distinguished  from  the 
position  of  others  therein.  The  land  that  he  cul- 
tivates or  otherwise  improves  is  his  in  the  sense 
that  he  rather  than  some  one  else  occupies  and 
uses  it,  but  it  is  not  and  can  not  be  his  in  the  same 
sense  as  the  crop  that  he  raises  or  the  house  that  he 
builds  upon  it.  Whether  a  man  has  a  right  to  ac- 
tual property  or  not  depends  upon  whether  he  has 
produced  and  saved  any,  the  right  of  property  be- 
ing as  it  were  inchoate,  and  not  vesting  until  there 
is  a  labour-product  between  which  and  its  producer 
the  relation  may  exist. 

The  right  to  land,  on  the  other  hand,  waits  not 
on  the  action  or  will  of  any  man,  but  is  a  con- 
stituent element  of  that  natural  freedom  which  is 
the  inalienable  birthright  of  every  human  being. 
If  any  man  were  to  have  other  than  his  natural 
right  to  land,  he  would  of  necessity  have  to  ac- 
quire it  from  some  other  man  or  men;  but  they 
have  only  their  natural  right,  which  being  in- 
alienable can  be  neither  transferred  to  nor  ac- 
quired by  any  man. 

The  existing  system  of  land  tenure  not  only  fails 
to  secure  equal  enjoyment  of  the  right  to  land,  but 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  91 

deprives  an  ever  increasing  majority  of  all  en- 
joyment of  that  right.  Held  as  by  right  of  prop- 
erty, the  land  sooner  or  later  passes  into  the  ex- 
clusive possession  and  so-called  ownership  of  a 
more  or  less  limited  number  of  men  who  are  by 
the  State  empowered  and  virtually  obliged  to 
exact  from  other  men  a  price  for  being  on  earth. 
That  any  man  should  be  indebted  to  another  for 
occupancy  or  use  of  the  earth,  would  never  occur 
to  them  as  members  of  Society  merely,  there  being 
nothing  in  the  nature  of  things,  no  human  relation, 
to  suggest  any  such  obligation.  And  yet  the  State 
decrees  that  whatever  earthly  opportunities  a  land- 
less man  would  enjoy  he  must  purchase  from  some 
other  man  or  men,  as  if  they  were,  as  they  legally 
are,  the  only  ones  having  any  right  on  earth. 
Nor  can  any  so-called  owner  of  land  be  legally 
compelled  to  sell  or  even  to  lease  any  part  of  it 
however  much  he  may  hold,  for  he  holds  it  as 
by  right  of  property  and  may  use  it  or  not  as  he 
pleases,  and  might  even  destroy  it  if  he  could. 
It  is  a  dear  price  that  is  paid  for  any  advantages 
such  a  system  may  have  over  even  no  system  at 
all;  a  price,  however,  that  is  not  paid  by  those 
who  enjoy  the  advantages.  Under  it,  as  already 
seen,  most  men  are  deprived  of  all  natural  op- 


92  TJie  Orthocratic  State 

portunities  for  self-support;  not  only  of  the  op- 
portunity to  employ  themselves,  but  also  of  the 
natural  market  for  sale  of  their  labour,  which  they 
needs  must  sell  if  they  are  to  live,  but  which  no 
man  is  compelled  to  buy.  It  would  be  hard  to 
conceive  of  a  system  more  subversive  of  human 
rights  or  more  incompatible  with  an  equitable 
order. 

A  kindred  abuse  is  to  be  seen  in  the  usual 
method  of  performing  services  tliat  require  monop- 
olistic use  of  public  highways.  Such  services 
have  been  seen  to  be  public,  or  governmental  in 
their  nature,  and  ought  therefore  to  be  performed 
by  the  State  itself,  to  the  end  that  they  be  con- 
ducted solely  in  the  interest  of  the  public,  and  in 
such  manner  as  not  to  interfere  with  private 
interests  or  the  enjoyment  of  natural  rights. 
Farmed  out  as  they  very  generally  are  to  public- 
service  corporations,  they  can  not  in  the  nature 
of  things  be  rendered  with  an  eye  single  to  the 
public  interest,  for  their  performance  becomes  a 
divided  duty  involving  the  service  of  two  mas- 
ters, the  stockholder  and  the  State,  whose  inter- 
ests are  by  no  means  identical.  Moreover,  the 
prestige  and  power  that  come  from  connection 
with  the  public-service  corporation  will  inevita- 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  93 

bly  and  not  unnaturally  be  utilised  by  its  mem- 
bers to  their  advantage  over  their  unprivileged 
competitors  in  private  business,  as  well  as  over 
the  public  in  matters  of  civic  interest.  The  po- 
litical boss  about  whom  there  is  so  much  innocent 
prattle,  and  who  when  deposed  gives  place  to 
another,  is  generally  the  political  choice  of  the 
public-service  and  other  powerful  corporations, 
holding  his  place  by  virtue  of  their  more  or  less 
hidden  but  no  less  influential  support. 

There  is  no  good  reason  why  all  services  re- 
quiring monopolistic  operation  or  use  of  rail- 
roads, telegraph  and  telephone  lines,  and  plants 
for  general  distribution  of  water,  light,  heat  and 
power,  including  the  transportation  of  passen- 
igers  and  freight  and  the  transmission  of  intelli- 
Igence,  should  not  be  conducted  by  the  State  di- 
rectly, and  with  as  little  discrimination  or  favour- 
itism as  ordinarily  obtains  among  travellers  along 
a  country  road.  The  individual,  natural  persons 
employed  in  the  governmental  conduct  of  such 
services  would  have  but  one  set  of  interests  to 
serve,  and  but  one  employer,  the  State. 

Nor  will  there  be  any  such  actual  addition  as 
may  be  supposed  to  the  responsibilities  and  ac- 
tivities of  the  State  when  it  shall  itself  in  a  di- 


94  The  OrtJiocratic  State 

rectly  administrative  and  rational  manner  dis- 
charge public  functions  whose  necessarily  unsat- 
isfactory performance  by  corporations  it  now 
wastes  so  much  time  and  effort  in  futile  attempts 
to  regulate.  There  is  no  right  way  of  doing 
wrong,  no  saving  of  time  or  toil  in  the  endeavour 
to  reach  by  devious  ways  a  goal  to  which  there 
is  a  direct  and  open  road,  nor  does  the  State  les- 
sen so  much  as  it  complicates  its  responsibilities 
by  seeking  to  avoid  them.  Its  highways  are  in 
their  nature  public  and  their  monopolistic  use  for 
private  gain  is  as  unreasonable  and  unjust  and 
quite  as  incompatible  with  an  equitable  public 
order  as  it  would  be  for  the  State  to  assume  con- 
trol and  operation  of  enterprises  of  a  private 
nature.  The  distinction  between  what  is  social 
and  what  is  individual,  between  things,  functions 
and  values  that  are  public  and  those  that  are 
private,  exists  in  their  very  nature  and  can  not  be 
ignored  without  disturbance  of  the  natural  order, 
an  unjust  and  injurious  interference  with  that 
equal  enjoyment  of  natural  rights  which  the  State 
is  in  duty  bound  to  secure.  All  public  services 
will  eventually  be  rendered  by  the  State  without 
charge,  their  cost  being  paid  out  of  the  values 
which  they  add  to  land. 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  95 

The  State  abuses  its  power  whenever  in  mak- 
ing provision  for  a  legal-tender  currency  it  adopts 
an  unstable  measure  of  values,  as  well  as  when 
it  authorises  private  persons  natural  or  artificial 
to  perform  the  public  service  and  governmental 
function  of  providing  the  legalised  circulating 
medium  of  exchange.  Such  currency  should  be 
so  constituted  and  controlled  as  to  afford  the  pub- 
lic an  unvarying  measure  of  values  as  well  as  an 
equitably  available  medium  for  the  exchange  of 
commodities  and  services.  It  should  not  be  such 
as  to  become  itself  the  subject  of  barter,  but 
should  serve  only  to  facilitate  barter  through  the 
economic  device  of  a  sale. 

A  sale  differs  from  barter  in  that  it  consists  in 
the  exchange  of  some  commodity  or  service,  not 
for  some  other,  but  for  money,  some  medium  of 
exchange  generally  receivable  in  payment  for  all 
subjects  of  barter,  the  sale  being  as  it  were  a  half- 
completed  barter  of  which  the  money  is  evidence, 
and  which  is  completed  when  some  other  com- 
modity or  service  is  finally  received  for  and  in 
place  of  the  money.  When  the  money,  the  me- 
dium of  exchange,  is  itself  a  commodity,  gold  or 
silver  for  instance,  its  value  fluctuates  as  do  the 
values  of  other  commodities,  and  so  fails  to  re- 


96  The  Orthocratic  State 

main  a  fixed,  stable  measure  of  value.  Whoever 
holds  it  or  has  it  owing  to  him  for  any  consider- 
able time  will  be  either  a  gainer  or  loser  thereby, 
for  its  value  although  apparently  fixed  by  its 
being  the  legalised  and  generally  accepted  meas- 
ure of  values,  becomes  in  reality  greater  or  less 
than  that  with  which  he  parted  for  it. 

Whenever  the  promissory  notes  of  private  per- 
sons natural  or  artificial  are  given  any  advantages 
of  circulation  over  those  of  people  in  general,  the 
persons  so  privileged  are  not  only  given  that 
advantage  but  are  thereby  enabled  to  exert  an 
undue  influence  over  the  legalised  medium  of 
exchange.  The  currency  authorised  by  the  State 
should  be  as  free  from  private  monopoly  and 
control  as  the  public  highways.  It  is  indeed  it- 
self a  public  highway  for  the  passing  to  and  fro 
of  values  in  exchange;  as  commodities  are  trans- 
ported from  seller  to  buyer  by  means  of  the  rail- 
way, so  are  their  values  transmitted  from  buyer 
to  seller  by  means  of  the  currency. 

Reference  has  already  been  made  to  the  rais- 
ing of  public  revenues  by  methods  so  irrational 
as  to  constitute  most  evident  abuses  of  civil 
power.  It  would  be  difficult  to  specify  in  what 
respect  ordinary  methods  of  taxation  can  be  re- 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  97 

garded  as  rational  or  just.  They  are  unjust  in 
that  they  cause  the  burdens  of  taxation,  of  which 
indeed  there  should  be  none,  to  be  borne  for  the 
greater  part  by  those  who  are  not  only  the  least 
able  to  bear  them,  but  who  derive  the  least  if  any 
benefit  from  expenditures  of  the  public  revenue. 
It  has  yet  to  be  shown  that  the  majority  of  man- 
kind are  economically  benefitted  by  existing  gov- 
ernment. But  for  the  legalised  system  of  land 
tenure,  the  perhaps  dull-witted  but  able-bodied 
tramp  might  well  maintain  himself  in  possession 
of  a  cabin-patch  of  ground  sufficient  for  his  self- 
support,  and  that  without  injury  to  any  man. 

Taxes  upon  wealth  or  upon  the  means  or 
methods  of  producing  it,  including  tariff  and  ex- 
cise taxes,  are  needless  and  unjust  interferences 
with  and  hindrances  to  industry;  great  as  is  their 
total  amount  it  is  perhaps  not  greater  than  the 
loss  which  they  occasion  to  the  production  of 
wealth.  They  tend  to  destroy  the  natural  mar- 
ket and  so  to  defeat  the  object  for  which  they  are 
collected,  the  maintenance  of  an  equitable  public 
order.  They  are,  moreover,  in  much  the  greater 
part,  paid  by  those  who  are  also  obliged  to  pay 
the  tribute  of  earth-rent  to  private  persons  privi- 
leged to  appropriate  it. 


98  The  Orthocratic  State 

The  abuses  to  which  attention  has  so  far  been 
directed  consist  in  the  use  of  improper  means  or 
methods  for  accomplishing  legitimate  ends,  in 
attempts  to  secure  natural  rights  through  their 
infringement.  It  remains  to  notice  abuses  of  the 
third  class,  those  which  consist  in  the  use  of  civil 
power,  not  for  such  ends,  not  in  attempting  to 
discharge  governmental  functions,  but  for  pur- 
poses wholly  unwarranted  by  any  most  extended 
authority  of  government  and  absolutely  foreign 
to  all  of  its  functions. 

In  considering  abuses  of  this  class  it  should  be 
remembered  that,  no  matter  how  desirable  the  end 
in  view,  if  it  is  not  necessary  to  maintenance  of 
an  equitable  public  order,  to  the  discharge  of 
some  one  or  more  of  the  four  only  legitimate 
functions  of  government,  attempt  to  accomplish 
that  end  through  the  exercise  of  civil  power 
tends  to  destroy  that  order.  With  the  best  of 
motives,  but  with  no  very  lively  sense  of  the 
moral  obligation  devolving  upon  the  State  as 
trustee  of  the  power  it  forcibly  assumes  to  exer- 
cise, the  mistake  is  often  made  of  using  it  in  un- 
necessarily vain  attempts  not  only  to  promote  mo- 
rality and  social  progress  at  heme,  but  even  to  ad- 
vance civilisation  abroad. 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  99 

That  the  State  cannot  justly  undertake  to  en- 
force any  code  of  morals  appears  clearly  from  the 
self-evident  proposition  that  no  man  has  any 
right  to  use  force  in  the  attempt  to  make  another 
moral,  and  that  still  less  has  any  man  a  right  to 
compel  others  to  aid  him  in  any  such  attempt,  so 
long  as  the  immorality  involves  infringement  of 
no  natural  right.  If  a  man's  immorality  or  wick- 
edness does  not  interfere  with  any  other  human 
being's  freedom  to  be  moral  or  good,  his  merely 
immoral  conduct  is  not  subject  to  forcible  control 
by  any  other  man  or  by  the  State.  Whenever 
the  immoral  conduct  involves  an  aggression,  the 
infringement  of  a  natural  right,  as  it  often  does, 
it  is  of  course  amenable  to  self-defensive  control 
by  those  whom  it  injures  and  hence  by  the  State, 
but  it  is  the  aggression  rather  than  the  immo- 
rality with  which  the  State  has  to  deal,  and  with 
that  for  purposes  of  peace  and  order  only  and  not 
of  morality.  Under  just  government,  men  must, 
as  men,  have  the  freedom  to  do,  according  to  their 
respective  abilities,  if  but  peaceably,  whatever 
things  they  have  the  right,  as  between  man  and 
man,  to  do  as  members  of  Society;  and  as  cit- 
izens they  can  justly  do  only  such  other  things 
as    they   find    it    self-defensively   necessary    and 


100  The  Orthocratic  State 

therefore  right  for  them  to  do,  but  lack  ability  to 
accomplish  without  the  aid  of  government.  To 
attempt  more  than  this,  tends  to  destroy  that 
freedom,  and  to  set  man  as  a  citizen  against  man 
as  man,  an  antagonism  to  which  the  evils  of  gov- 
ernment are  largely  due.  The  only  way  in  which 
the  State  can  really  promote  morality  is  to  be 
itself  moral,  that  is,  by  permitting  no  immoral, 
unjust  use  of  its  power. 

The  most  that  the  State  can  do  for  civilisation 
and  social  progress  is  to  mind  its  own  business. 
With  the  promotion  of  civilisation  abroad  it  can 
have  no  proper  concern,  while  the  progress  of  its 
own  people  can  be  really  promoted  only  by  se- 
curing them  in  the  free  and  equal  enjoyment  of 
natural  opportunities  for  progress.  For  the 
State  to  undertake  more  than  this  is  to  be  itself 
retrogressive,  immoral  and  unjust,  and  to  retard 
rather  than  promote  the  progress  of  mankind. 

How  irrational,  for  instance,  and  even  crim- 
inally insane,  how  purposeless  and  impertinent, 
and  how  entirely  evil  in  its  effects,  is  the  pitiful 
absurdity  of  punishing  a  man  for  failing  to  suc- 
ceed in  the  attempt  to  take  his  own  life.  It  is 
no  part  of  any  function  of  government  to  protect 
a  sane  man  against  himself,  or  to  punish  the  in- 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  101 

sane.  Much  better  would  it  be  for  the  State  to 
see  that  it  is  never  itself  in  any  way  responsible 
for  the  despair  that  drives  to  suicide. 

A  favourite  abuse  of  civil  power  is  that  of 
using  it  for  the  supposed  promotion  of  industry. 
There  are  legitimate  activities  of  the  State  which 
are  essentially  promotive  of  industry,  as  are 
nearly  all  those  constituting  its  Public-serving 
function;  they  are  governmental,  however,  not 
because  they  promote  industry,  but  for  the  reason 
that  they  are  necessary  to  an  equitable  public 
order  and  can  not  be  carried  on  without  civil  au- 
thority. No  matter  how  much  of  aid  or  encour- 
agement to  industry  it  may  seem  to  promise,  any 
exercise  of  civil  power  not  necessary  to  that  order 
is  prima  facie  an  abuse  of  that  power,  and  will 
be  found  to  involve  inequitable  interferences  with 
enjoyment  of  natural  opportunities  for  industry. 

Such  an  abuse  is  to  be  seen  in  the  maintenance 
of  protective  tariffs,  for  they  belong  to  no  func- 
tion of  government;  not  to  the  first,  since  they 
are  not  essential  to  peace,  but  rather  tend  to  dis- 
turb it;  not  to  the  second,  for  they  protect  no 
man  from  the  aggression  of  another,  but  infringe 
upon  the  right  of  all  men  to  a  natural  market; 
not  to  the  third,  for  their  maintenance  is  not  nee- 


102  The  Orthocratic  State 

essary  to  an  equitable  public  order,  but  tends 
rather  to  inequitable  disorder;  and  not  to  the 
fourth,  for  they  are  not  essential  to  the  integrity 
of  the  State,  but  invite  hostility  to  it.  They  are 
not  only  unnecessary  to  the  discharge  of  any  gov- 
ernmental function  and  therefore  a  prima  facie 
abuse  of  civil  power,  but  they  are,  moreover,  a 
positively  injurious  interference  by  government 
itself  with  that  freedom  of  contract  and  exchange 
which  it  is  in  duty  bound  to  maintain. 

The  object  of  a  protective  tariff  is  to  render 
prosecution  of  the  favoured  industry  more  profit- 
able than  it  would  be  without  protection,  which 
is  accomplished  by  forcing  consumers  to  pay  more 
than  they  otherwise  would  for  its  products.  This 
evident  injustice  to  them  is  supposed  to  be  in 
some  way  offset  or  atoned  for  through  the  alleged 
payment  of  higher  wages  than  could  otherwise 
be  paid  to  employes  of  the  protected  industry. 
It  is  clear,  however,  that  no  such  uncertain,  hap- 
hazard balancing  of  opposing  tendencies  can  re- 
sult in  doing  justice  or  in  giving  equal  advantage 
to  all  the  people.  A  tariff  can  not  increase  the 
wealth  of  any  portion  of  a  people,  except  at  the 
expense  of  some  other  portion,  for  it  cannot  in- 
crease the  sum  total  of  the  wealth  of  the  whole 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power    ^         103 

people.  With  respect  to  foreign  trade,  a  State 
must  of  necessity  be  in  one  of  three  situations. 
Its  people  may  themselves  consume  all  the  wealth 
they  produce,  and  so  have  no  surplus  for  export; 
they  may  have  a  surplus,  for  the  whole  of  which 
they  find  a  ready  market  abroad;  or  they  may 
find  such  a  market  for  only  a  part  of  their  sur- 
plus. In  the  first  case,  having  no  exports,  they 
can  have  no  imports  against  which  to  protect  any- 
body. In  the  second  place,  their  exports  are  ex- 
changed more  or  less  directly  for  desired  imports 
which  they  thereby  obtain  at  a  less  cost,  or  ex- 
penditure of  wealth,  than  would  be  incurred  by 
their  protected  production  at  home.  Nor  is  there 
anything  that  protection  can  do  to  relieve  the 
situation  in  the  third  case.  That  part  of  the  sur- 
plus which  finds  a  market  abroad  is  there  ex- 
changed for  imports  costing  less  than  they  would 
if  produced  at  home,  or  they  would  not  be  im- 
ported. With  regard  to  any  remaining  surplus, 
to  things  for  which  there  is  no  market  at  home  or 
abroad,  it  is  evident  that  their  production  must 
sooner  or  later  give  place  to  that  of  things  for 
which  there  is  a  demand ;  but  there  can  be  no  pro- 
tection necessary  or  all-around  helpful  to  making 
the  industrial  change,  since  it  contemplates  the 


104  The  OrtJiocratic  State 

production  of  things  of  which  there  is  a  scarcity, 
and  of  which  there  are  no  competing  importa- 
tions against  which  there  can  be  any  possible  need 
of   protection.     Whenever    any   portion   of   the 
people,  be  they  capitalists  or  wage-workers,  are 
benefited  by  a  protective  tariff  or  by  any  other 
privilege,  it  must  of  necessity  be  to  the  corre- 
sponding injury  of  other  capitalists  and  labour- 
ers.    The   State   should   not   interfere   with   the 
\         natural  returns  to  labour  and  capital,  with  either 
\        wages  or  interest,  and  would  have  no  occasion  to 
\       do  so  but  for  abuses  of  its  power  tending  to  de- 
\     stroy  the  natural  market,  in  which  alone  can  be 
\     determined  what  is  a  just  wage  for  labour,  a  fair 
\    interest  on  capital,  or  a  reasonable  price  for  any 
\   commodity  or  service. 

1       A  kindred  abuse  obtains  in  the  grant  of  sub- 

1  sidies.     They  are  not  necessary  to  the  discharge 

■.  of  any  function  of  government,  and  whatever  of 

^  advantage  they  bring  to  those  privileged  to  re- 

/  ceive  them  is  at  the  expense  and  to  the  disadvan- 

,     tage   of   the   unprivileged.     Assistance   that   the 

/     State  renders  to  anybody  and  not  to  all,  must  be 

to  the  detriment  of  somewhat  less  than  all,  less 

by  the  number  of  those  assisted.     If  there  be  any 

undertakings  necessary  to  peace  and  public  order 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  105 

but  exceeding  the  compass  of  unsubsidised  pri- 
vate enterprise,  they  constitute  public  services 
and  should  be  carried  on  by  the  State  for  the 
equal  benefit  of  all. 

The  grant  of  so-called  patent  rights  is  another 
civil  abuse  and  patent  wrong.  Rights  are  not 
and  cannot  be  granted.  They  exist  in  the  nature 
of  things  or  not  at  all,  and  are  not  transferable. 
Property  itself  may  indeed  be  transferred  even  as 
it  may  be  abandoned  or  destroyed,  but  in  any  case 
it  is  the  specific  thing,  the  concrete  property  alone 
that  is  parted  with  and  not  the  owner's  abstract 
and  only  right  of  property,  which  merely  ceases 
to  obtain  with  respect  to  the  particular  property 
transferred.  When,  through  exercise  .of  the  right 
of  contract,  property  passes  from  grantor  to 
grantee,  it  becomes  the  latter's  by  virtue  of  his 
own  right  of  property,  the  grantor  no  more  part- 
ing with  the  right  by  which  he  held  the  property 
than  with  the  hand  in  which  he  held  it.  Natural 
rights,  and  there  can  be  no  other,  are  not  the  sub- 
ject of  barter;  it  is  through  their  exercise  that 
barter  is  carried  on,  that  contracts  and  grants  are 
made.  All  that  the  State  can  do  with  respect  to 
rights  is  either  to  secure  or  to  interfere  with  the 
enjoyment  of  rights  which  belong  to  mankind  as 


106  The  Orthocratic  State 

members  of  Society,  and  by  virtue  of  which  they 
establish  the  State.  It  can  create  no  rights,  and 
can  grant  no  man  any  right  without  first  taking 
it  from  some  other  man,  and  that  it  cannot  really 
do,  since  rights  are  inalienable.  Any  right  the 
State  undertakes  to  grant  is  in  reality  a  wrong,  an 
interference  with  the  enjoyment  of  rights. 

The  so-called  owner  of  a  patented  device  may 
for  reasons  of  his  own  not  only  neglect  to  intro- 
duce it  into  use  but  also  forbid  anybody  else  to 
use  it,  thereby  denying  the  people  all  benefit  of 
that  which  any  one  of  them  might  himself  have 
devised  and  used  but  for  the  State's  interference. 
No  man  can  justly  be  deprived  of  the  freedom 
to  make  use  of  any  method  or  mode  of  applying 
a  principle  that  he  might  himself  have  discovered 
or  invented  and  so  have  utilised  but  for  prohibi- 
tion of  the  State.  The  inventor  of  the  first  rude 
implement  whatever  it  may  have  been  had  no 
right  forcibly  to  prevent  any  other  man  from 
making  or  using  a  similar  one;  and  so  of  any  in- 
vention or  improvement,  its  use  is  never  a  prop- 
erty right.  It  is  the  concrete  product  and  not  the 
manner  of  producing  it  that  constitutes  property. 
If  a  mere  device,  scheme,  or  mode  of  contrivance 
were  indeed  property,  the  State  should  maintain 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  107 

the  owner  in  permanent  control  and  enjoyment  of 
it  as  in  case  of  other  property,  and  could  not 
justly  limit  proprietorship  of  it  to  any  number  of 
years. 

If  it  could  be  shown  that  a  discovery  or  in- 
vention of  substantial  benefit  to  all  the  people 
was  wholly  due  to  the  purposeful  effort  of  any 
individual,  the  State  might  seem  warranted  in 
making  him  suitable  return  for  his  service  to  the 
public.  The  advantages  of  the  invention  would 
then  be  immediately  shared  by  all  the  people  in 
common  rather  than  monopolised  to  the  emolu- 
ment of  those  privileged  to  exploit  it,  among 
whom  the  inventor  is  not  always  to  be  found. 

Reference  has  already  been  made  to  the  arti- 
ficial persons  known  as  corporations.  Their 
creation  by  the  State  being  unnecessary  to  the 
discharge  of  any  of  its  functions  is  prima  facie 
an  abuse  of  its  power.  Their  use  has  become  so 
prevalent,  however,  not  only  in  the  performance 
of  public  services  but  also  in  the  conduct  of 
private  business  of  almost  every  sort,  that  the 
abuse  calls  for  more  than  passing  notice.  Re- 
sort to  the  privilege  of  incorporation  for  purposes 
of  industrial  combination  has  indeed  become  so 
customary  and  familiar  as  to  induce  a  tendency 


108  The  Orihocratic  State 

of  the  public  mind  to  confound  the  governmental 
act  of  incorporation  with  the  natural  right  of  co- 
operation, and  to  regard  any  criticism  of  the  cor- 
poration as  evidence  of  hostility  to  combination 
in  general.  Such  criticism  has  been  likened  to 
the  one-time  hostility  of  labourers  to  labour-sav- 
ing machinery.  The  comparison  is  faulty  for 
the  reason  that  corporations  have  a  different  effect 
upon  industrial  and  social  conditions  from  any 
produced  by  machinery,  and  is  especially  inapt  in 
that  the  machine  is  the  legitimate  child  of  labour, 
whereas  the  corporation  is  the  irregular  offspring 
of  civil  power. 

Industrial  combinations  that  can  be  formed 
and  maintained  without  special  favour  of  the 
State  may  indeed  be  as  beneficial  as  labour-sav- 
ing machines.  Any  governmental  restriction 
imposed  upon  unprivileged  partnerships  and  busi- 
ness associations  would  be  as  irrational  as  any 
antagonism  to  the  introduction  of  machinery. 
Co-operation  voluntary  and  unprivileged  is  sim- 
ply an  exercise  of  the  natural  right  of  contract. 
It  requires  neither  aid  nor  permission  of  the 
State,  and  is  properly  no  more  subject  to  govern- 
mental interference  or  supervision  than  any 
simplest    form    of    individual    enterprise.     Any 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power   ^  109 

man  has  an  undoubted  right  to  enter  into  agree- 
ment with  any  number  of  other  men  whereby 
they  undertake  for  a  stipulated  wage  to  assist 
him  in  the  prosecution  of  any  legitimate  busi- 
ness. He  and  they  have  no  less  right  to  make 
a  different  agreement  according  to  which  they 
combine  to  carry  on  the  same  or  any  other  busi- 
ness for  their  joint  or  common  benefit.  The 
State  has  properly  no  more  concern  with  the  lat- 
ter contract  than  with  the  former,  its  legitimate 
function  in  regard  to  either  being  merely  to  pro- 
vide for  peaceable  and  equitable  adjustment  of 
any  differences  arising  therefrom,  which  it  does 
not  especially  or  primarily  for  the  sake  of  parties 
to  the  difference,  but  for  the  sake  of  an  equitable 
public  order. 

Natural  combinations,  those  that  can  be 
formed  without  authority  or  aid  of  the  State,  are 
subject  to  beneficent  limitations  of  natural  law 
in  regard  both  to  the  number  of  individuals  who 
will  combine  as  well  as  to  the  length  of  time  they 
will  continue  to  act  together,  and  consequently 
also  in  regard  to  the  amount  of  capital  they  can 
command  and  the  influence  they  will  be  able  to 
exert.  There  is  nothing  in  reason  or  experience 
to  warrant  apprehension  that  any  body  of  men 


110  The  Orthocratic  State 

will  merely  by  reason  of  such  combination  ever 
become  so  great  or  powerful  as  to  monopolise 
any  considerable  industry.  Any  approach  that  a 
natural  combination  may  make  toward  such 
monopoly  will  be  due  to  some  sort  of  privilege 
enjoyed  by  it  rather  than  to  its  collective  char- 
acter. The  more  intelligent  and  trustworthy 
men  become  the  more  readily  will  they  unite  and 
co-operate  with  one  another  for  common  pur- 
poses, with  a  tendency  no  doubt  to  larger  and 
larger  combinations,  but  this  natural  and  there- 
fore beneficent  tendency  should  not  be  con- 
founded with  the  present  abnormal  drift  toward 
utter  displacement  of  natural  associations  by  arti- 
ficial combinations  made  possible  by  the  grant  of 
corporate  privilege,  the  loan  of  civil  power. 

The  corporation  is  a  politico-economic  device 
whereby  natural  persons  desiring  to  co-operate 
for  one  purpose  or  another  are  by  favour  of  the 
State  more  or  less  relieved  from  limitations  which 
nature  wisely  imposes  upon  natural  associations, 
and  the  collective  body  which  they  are  so  enabled 
to  form  becomes  an  artificial  person  having  at- 
tributes and  powers  not  enjoyed  by  natural  per- 
sons or  associations,  being  unnatural  and  peculiar 
to  the  body  politic,  the  State,  from  which  they  are 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  111 

derived.  The  corporation  was  originally  de- 
vised for  the  purpose  of  clothing  individuals  with 
civil  authority  to  perform  some  apparently  pub- 
lic service  which  did  not  seem  to  have  been  ade- 
quately provided  for  in  the  ordinary  machinery 
of  government.  Services  so  performed  having 
been  in  reality  sometimes  public  and  at  other 
times  private,  the  privilege  of  incorporation  has 
more  or  less  gradually  come  to  be  granted  for  the 
prosecution  of  undertakings  of  nearly  every  char- 
acter and  finally  to  be  had  for  the  asking;  so  that 
charters  or  articles  of  incorporation,  being  now 
nominally  free  to  all,  are  sometimes  thought  to 
be  no  longer  privileges.  It  is  evident,  however, 
that  the  incorporated  company  has  advantages 
over  the  mere  partnership,  for  otherwise  the 
former  would  not  have  become  as  it  has  the  rule 
and  the  latter  the  increasingly  rare  exception  in 
almost  every  line  of  business.  That  such  advan- 
tages are  privileges  has  been  unanimously  held 
by  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States  in 
affirming  constitutionality  of  the  Federal  Corpo- 
ration Tax  law,  the  Court  saying:  "The  tax  is 
laid  upon  the  privileges  which  exist  in  conducting 
business  with  the  advantages  which  inhere  in  the 
corporate  capacity  of  those  taxed,  and  which  are 


112  The  Orthocratic  State 

not  enjoyed  by  private  persons  or  individuals. 
These  advantages  are  obvious  and  have  led  to  the 
formation  of  such  companies  in  nearly  all 
branches  of  trade.  The  continuity  of  the  busi- 
ness without  interruption  by  death  or  dissolution; 
the  transfer  of  property  interests  by  the  disposi- 
tion of  shares  of  stock;  the  advantages  of  busi- 
ness controlled  and  managed  by  corporate  di- 
rectors; the  general  absence  of  individual 
liability;  these  and  other  things  inhere  in  the  ad- 
vantages of  business  thus  conducted,  which  do 
not  exist  when  the  same  business  is  conducted  by 
private  individuals  or  partnerships.  It  is  this 
distinctive  privilege  which  is  the  subject  of  tax- 
ation, and  not  the  mere  buying  or  selling  or  hand- 
ling of  goods,  which  may  be  the  same,  whether 
done  by  corporations  or  individuals." 

It  is  clear  that  the  advantages  of  incorporation 
cannot  be  enjoyed  by  all,  but  only  by  those  who 
already  have  an  advantage  over  their  less  suc- 
cessful fellow  men,  in  that  they  have  capital  to 
invest;  that  they  are  privileges  beyond  the  reach 
of  those  who  have  only  their  labour  to  depend 
upon,  and  so  tend  to  widen  the  economic  distance 
between  the  labourer  and  the  capitalist.  Nor  is 
it  the  labourer  alone  whom  they  put  to  an  un- 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  113 

natural  disadvantage.  There  are  many  possessors 
of  capital  who  do  not  find  it  practicable  or  do  not 
care  to  avail  themselves  of  the  privilege  of  incor- 
poration, but  who  would  be  glad  to  engage  in 
business  as  natural  persons,  opportunity  to  do 
which  the  State  should  secure  to  them  instead  of 
depriving  them  of  it,  as  it  does  by  forcing  them 
to  compete  if  at  all  with  abnormally  powerful 
persons  of  its  own  meddlesome  creation.  Such 
possessors  of  capital  cannot  themselves  employ  it, 
but  must,  not  from  fault  of  their  own  or  from 
any  natural  cause  or  process  of  evolution  but  at 
the  arbitrary  behest  of  the  State,  let  it  remain 
idle  and  unproductive  or  risk  it  on  the  ability 
and  honesty  of  strangers,  in  stock  speculation. 
In  all  the  fields  of  industrial  activity,  natural 
persons  and  associations,  the  only  ones  having 
any  right  to  compete  in  the  production  and  accu- 
mulation of  wealth,  are  being  supplanted  by 
artificial  ones  which  have  not  even  the  right  to 
be,  for  the  reason  that  rights  are  of  necessity  al- 
ways natural. 

Nature  produces  inequalities  enough  in  the 
common  struggle  for  human  existence,  and  it 
would  seem  that  if  there  is  to  be  any  interference 
by  the  State  it  should  be  in  behalf  of  the  weaker 


114  The  Orthocratic  State 

rather  than  the  stronger.  On  the  contrary,  how- 
ever, it  is  the  latter  who  are  authorised  and  en- 
abled to  merge  themselves  and  their  interests  in 
that  artificial  personality,  the  corporation,  which 
inoculated  with  the  virus  of  privilege  enters  the 
competitive  field  immune  from  ordinary  vicissi- 
tudes, relieved  from  the  infirmities  of  disease, 
death  and  conscience,  and  sooner  or  later  outdis- 
tances its  unprivileged  competitors  by  lengths 
that  could  never  be  attained  by  natural  persons 
or  associations  one  over  another.  It  is  some- 
times said,  as  in  extenuation  of  the  destruction  of 
individual  enterprise  by  corporate  monopoly, 
that  it  is  natural  for  big  fish  to  swallow  little 
ones,  which  may  be  true,  but  it  is  to  be  remem- 
bered that  they  do  not  become  big  or  devour  their 
kind  through  the  power  of  government  instituted 
and  maintained  by  themselves  in  the  name  of  jus- 
tice. 

The  State  abuses  its  power  in  so  far  as  it  neg- 
lects to  provide  for  the  free,  equal,  active  and 
most  effective  expression  possible  of  the  indi- 
vidual opinion  and  preference  of  its  members  in 
regard  to  all  matters  of  government,  by  women 
as  well  as  by  men,  by  poor  as  well  as  by  rich,  and 
by  the  illiterate  as  well  as  by  the  learned;  for  the 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  115 

sake  of  peace  and  order  they  are  all  alike  required 
to  forego  individual  exercises  of  the  right  of 
self-defence,  and  are  hence  all  alike  entitled  to 
share  in  whatever  collective,  orderly  exercise 
thereof  is  substituted  therefor.  The  casting  of  a 
ballot  is  merely  civilised  exercise  of  the  natural 
right  of  self-defence.  Not  to  have  the  ballot  is 
to  be  governed  by  those  who  have  it.  To  be 
governed  by  others  than  ourselves  is  to  enjoy  the 
civil  liberty  allowed  to  slaves.  It  would  be 
clearly  unjust  for  the  poor  however  great  their 
majority  to  deny  the  rich  an  equal  voice  in  gov- 
ernment, and  for  women  to  exclude  men  from 
participation  therein  would  be  as  irrational  as  it 
is  for  men  to  exclude  women.  Nor  are  the 
learned  much  more  likely  than  the  illiterate  to 
correct  abuses  in  government.  The  most  highly 
educated  are  often  the  stanchest  defenders  of 
privilege.  No  government  by  a  self-selected 
class,  however  fit  to  govern  they  may  have 
deemed  themselves,  has  ever  been  so  nearly  per- 
fect as  to  warrant  excluding  from  its  councils 
anybody  interested  in  its  administration.  Any 
man  however  unlearned  can  understand  govern- 
ment so  long  as  it  minds  its  own  business.  It  is 
only  when  the  State  exercises  its  power  beyond 


116  The  Orthocratic  State 

right  that  the  learning  which  transcends  common 
sense  becomes  necessary  to  what  is  deemed  a 
proper  understanding  of  statecraft. 

It  is  an  abuse  of  civil  power  to  permit  any  ex- 
ercise of  it  to  pass  beyond  direct  control  of  the 
people.  Their  will  as  indicated  by  their  suf- 
frages must  from  the  nature  of  things  be  carried 
out  by  agents  through  what  is  called  representa- 
tive government,  but  the  more  direct  the  re- 
sponsibility of  its  agents,  the  more  truly  repre- 
sentative will  be  the  government  which  the  State 
maintains.  Like  any  other  agents,  public  serv- 
ants should  be  at  all  times  subject  to  discharge 
by  their  principals,  the  people;  otherwise  they 
would  become  for  the  time  virtually  principals, 
and  might  execute  their  own  rather  than  the  peo- 
ple's will.  However  independent  of  each  other 
different  branches  of  the  government  may  be, 
they  should  never  any  of  them  be  independent  of 
the  people. 

A  kindred  abuse  is  to  be  seen  whenever  the 
people  of  one  day  or  generation  attempt  through 
constitutional  or  other  prohibitions  in  any  way  to 
hamper  themselves  or  their  successors  in  the  ex- 
ercise of  civil  power.  The  true  relation  of  con- 
stitutional provisions  to  legislative  enactments  is 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  117 

not  unlike  that  which  rules  of  parliamentary 
procedure  adopted  by  a  deliberative  body  sustain 
to  the  resolutions  and  acts  of  such  body.  As  a 
general  rule,  subject  to  modification  under  excep- 
tional circumstances,  as  in  case  of  a  federation 
like  that  of  the  United  States  of  America,  a  con- 
stitution should  prescribe  the  manner  rather  than 
the  matter  or  limits  of  legislation,  and  in  any 
case  should  be  itself  readily  amendable.  Consti- 
tutional prohibitions  are  quite  as  likely  to  retard 
as  to  promote  that  progress  toward  rational 
government  which  should  at  all  times  be  feasible 
through  statutory  enactment  unhampered  by  any 
restrictions  other  than  those  imposed  by  require- 
ments of  an  equitable  public  order.  What  need 
of  charter  or  bill  of  rights  have  a  people  who 
have  no  political  superior,  who  are  free  to  govern 
themselves  and  whose  agents  are  ever  subject  to 
the  popular  will,  or  with  what  wisdom  shall  they 
tie  their  own  hands  as  against  themselves? 

It  is  also  an  abuse  of  civil  power  for  the  State 
to  require  questions  of  merely  local  concern,  gen- 
erally of  expediency  rather  than  of  absolute  right, 
to  be  submitted  for  determination  to  persons  out- 
side of  the  locality  concerned.  As  the  individual 
should  be  free  to  order  his  private  conduct  in  his 


118  The  Orthocratic  State 

own  way  so  long  as  he  interferes  with  no  natural 
right  of  another,  and  as  the  family  in  the  man- 
agement of  its  affairs  should  be  free  from  inter- 
ference by  others  of  the  neighbourhood,  so  should 
the  people  of  each  political  subdivision  of  the 
State,  of  a  city  or  county  for  instance,  be  free  to 
order  their  city  or  county  affairs  in  their  own  way, 
provided  they  thereby  infringe  no  natural  right 
and  cause  no  disturbance  of  the  public  order. 
There  may  be  many  different  ways  in  which  a 
county  might  perform  some  particular  service 
devolving  upon  it.  If  each  of  a  number  of  such 
ways  has  to  be  tried  by  as  many  or  more  different 
counties  of  the  State  at  the  same  time,  it  will  take 
at  least  as  many  years  to  try  them  all  and  ex- 
perimentally to  determine  which  is  best.  If,  on 
the  other  hand,  each  county  were  free  to  act  in- 
dependently of  the  others  and  to  try  whatever 
methods  it  would,  they  might  all  be  tried  and 
question  as  to  which  was  the  best  determined  in 
a  single  year.  This  principle  underlies  the  doc- 
trine of  home  rule  or  local  option,  as  it  also  does 
any  rational  theory  of  State  rights  as  against  fed- 
eral authority. 

It  is  another  abuse  of  its  power  for  the  State 
to  exclude  from  its  territory  any  well-intentioned 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power  ^  119 

person  voluntarily  seeking  to  make  his  home 
therein.  No  man  can  justly  be  prevented  by 
another  from  locating  wherever  on  earth  he  will, 
provided  he  does  not  thereby  interfere  with  the 
rightful  location  of  any  other,  nor  can  the  State 
justly  do  what  it  would  be  unjust  for  any  one  of 
its  individual  members  to  do.  It  has  little  more 
right  to  prevent  a  man's  peaceable  coming  into  its 
territory  than  to  forbid  his  being  born  therein; 
if  it  seems  to  be  crowded  it  is  probably  because 
somebody  is  taking  up  too  much  room.  Seem- 
ing necessity  for  the  exclusion  of  would-be  immi- 
grants will  disappear  upon  the  adoption  of  a  just 
system  of  land  tenure,  unjust  systems  being 
among  the  principal  causes  of  emigration.  Love 
of  country  is  generally  strong  in  hearts  out  of 
which  it  has  not  been  crushed  by  tyranny,  the 
exercise  of  power  beyond  right. 

It  would  seem  soon  enough  to  inquire  into  the 
object  of  a  man's  coming  when  his  conduct  indi- 
cates an  evil  purpose.  That  he  does  not  believe 
in  government  is  hardly  sufficient  reason  for  ex- 
cluding him.  His  experience  may  have  been 
such  as  to  induce  a  disbelief  which  the  State 
would  do  well  not  to  confirm,  and  he  may  never- 
theless prove  a  better  citizen  than  he  would  if  he 


120  The  Orthocratic  State 

believed  too  much  in  government,  or  in  too  much 
of  it.  When  one  considers  "all  the  oppressions 
that  are  done  under  the  sun,"  and  that  they  could 
not  persist  without  the  support  or  connivance  of 
civil  power,  he  will  hardly  wonder  that  men 
sometimes  lose  faith  in  government. 

It  will  be  observed  that  the  foregoing  conclu- 
sions are  not  so  much  mere  opinions  as  they  are 
the  logical,  inevitable  result  of  reasoning  from 
the  self-evident  proposition  that  the  only  just 
warrant  or  authority  for  any  exercise  of  civil 
power  is  the  natural,  individual  right  of  self-de- 
fence; and  that  it  devolves  upon  those  who  reject 
that  proposition  and  yet  believe  in  government, 
to  show  by  what  other  right  than  that  of  self-de- 
fence any  man,  any  number  of  men,  or  any  State,^ 
can  forcibly  control  the  conduct  of  any  man. 

It  is  only  through  correction  of  the  abuses  of 
civil  power  that  civic  progress  is  to  be  made. 
That  progress  must  of  necessity  be  more  or  less 
gradual  and  sometimes  exasperatingly  slow,  but 
every  step  in  the  right  direction  makes  the  next 
one  easier.  True  reform  in  government  is  to  be 
effected  not  through  the  enactment  of  more  law 
but  by  the  amendment  or  repeal  of  superabun- 
dant existing  law.     Laws  involving  abuses  of  the 


Abuses  of  Civil  Power    ^         121 

second  class,  the  use  of  irrational  methods  in  the 
endeavour  to  accomplish  legitimate  ends,  must 
be  amended  by  substituting  rational  methods; 
while  those  constituting  abuses  of  the  third  class, 
the  use  of  civil  power  for  illegitimate  purposes, 
must  be  repealed.  After  such  amendment  and 
repeal,  there  may  be  as  little  of  necessity  as  there 
now  is  of  room  for  what  is  called  constructive 
legislation. 


CHAPTER  V 

CIVIC    PROBLEMS 

Polonius : 

"And  now  remains, 
"That  we  find  out  the  cause  of  this  effect; 
"Or  rather  say,  the  cause  of  this  defect, 
"For  this  effect  defective  comes  by  cause." 

Shakespeare. 

Before  entering  upon  any  briefest  considera- 
tion of  so-called  problems  of  government,  it 
should  be  observed  that  a  problem  may  be  social, 
a  matter  of  even  serious  common  or  social  con- 
cern, and  yet  not  be  civic,  that  is,  susceptible  of 
solution  by  the  State.  It  is  not  a  problem  of 
government  unless  it  arises  from  conditions  due  to 
some  governmental  fault  of  omission  or  commis- 
sion, to  some  one  or  more  abuses  of  civil  power. 
Whenever  the  State  shall  be  fully  and  efficiently 
performing  all  its  legitimate  functions,  which 
precludes  the  use  of  its  power  for  any  other  pur- 
pose, it  will  be  discharging  its  whole  duty  and  for 
the  time  thereby  exhausting  its  authority.     Any 

122 


Civic  Problems  123 

problems  then  remaining  will  be  non-civic  and 
will  have  to  be  solved,  as  indeed  they  always 
must  be  if  at  all,  by  the  members  of  Society  act- 
ing in  their  private  capacity  and  not  as  citizens. 
For  the  State  to  undertake  the  solution  of  any 
such  problem  or  to  lend  its  power  for  that  pur- 
pose, would  be  to  abuse  its  power  and  to  compli- 
cate the  problem.  There  is  no  doubt,  however, 
that  the  solution  of  non-civic  problems  is  greatly 
retarded  and  in  many  cases  wholly  prevented  by 
the  persistence  of  civic  problems,  and  that  not 
only  civic  progress  but  all  human  advancement 
awaits  the  correction  of  those  governmental  abuses 
from  which  civic  problems  arise.  In  other 
words,  abuses  of  civil  power  not  only  give  rise  to 
troublesome  civic  problems  but  also  stand  in  the 
way  of  solving  those  not  civic.  Who  shall  say 
to  what  extent  solution  of  the  non-civic  problem 
of  promoting  moral  progress  is  hindered  by  the 
persistence  of  involuntary  poverty,  that  great 
civic  problem  and  prolific  cause  of  man's  degra- 
dation and  misery. 

Problems  of  government  have  been  aptly 
called  symptoms  of  disease  in  the  body  politic, 
but  it  is  not  necessary  to  wait  for  development  of 
the  symptoms  in  order  to  know  that  the  disease 


124  The  Orthocratic  State 

exists.  When  the  abuses  to  which  the  disorder 
is  due  are  known  to  exist  they  should  be  corrected 
without  waiting  for  it  to  culminate  in  what  is 
called  a  problem  of  government.  And  yet, 
though  an  abuse  of  civil  power  is  always  from  its 
beginning  directly  injurious  to  somebody,  it  is 
nevertheless  generally  allowed  to  continue  until 
its  evil  effects,  either  of  themselves  or  in  conjunc- 
tion with  those  of  other  abuses,  become  so  wide- 
spread and  acute  as  to  cause  that  degree  of  pop- 
ular unrest  which  eventually  compels  the  attention 
of  the  State.  And  even  then  the  so-called  prob- 
lem may  be  for  the  time  disposed  of  without 
correction  of  the  causal  abuse,  which  may  not 
only  remain  but  be  even  more  firmly  entrenched 
than  ever  before.  Popular  discontent  aroused 
by  the  irritating  spectacle  of  vast  landed  estates 
may  be  allayed  by  reducing  the  size  and  increas- 
ing the  number  of  individual  holdings,  but  the 
basic  wrong,  the  abuse  of  holding  land  as  if  it 
were  property,  will  have  as  many  more  inter- 
ested defenders  as  there  are  additions  to  the  num- 
ber of  so-called  land  owners,  while  the  hard  lot 
of  the  great  mass  of  the  people  still  expropriated 
from  the  soil,  will  be  little  if  any  improved. 
Dissolution  of  the  combinations  called  trusts  into 


Civic  Problems  125 

their  constituent  corporations,  does  not  render  the 
latter  any  the  less  destructive  of  natural  compe- 
tition, but  gives  them  the  additional  security  of 
express  or  implied  judicial  approval. 

As  the  moving  purpose  in  attempting  to  dispose 
of  this  or  that  problem  is  often  not  so  much  to  do 
even  tardy  justice  as  to  allay  the  peace-disturbing 
unrest,  attention  is  generally  directed  more  to 
mitigation  of  the  troublesome  effect  than  to  cor- 
rection of  the  abuse  that  causes  it.  Nor  is  it  al- 
vt^ays  easy  to  determine  whether  the  problem  is 
indeed  civic,  one  to  be  solved  by  the  State,  or  to 
identify  all  the  abuses  that  may  have  contributed 
to  complex  conditions  of  industrial  and  social 
hardship,  which  are  often  charged  to  causes  most 
diverse  as  well  as  remote,  industrial  panics,  for  in- 
stance, having  been  attributed  even  to  spots  on 
the  sun.  It  is,  however,  upon  such  incidental  oc- 
casions and  irrational  methods  that  the  State  is 
wont  to  rely  for  correction  of  civic  abuses.  As  the 
abuses  should  have  been  corrected  before  the  re- 
sulting problem  arose  and  as  they  must  be  cor- 
rected before  it  can  be  finally  solved,  it  is  clearly  a 
waste  of  time  and  a  further  abuse  of  its  power  for 
the  State  to  putter  and  pother  over  this  and  that 
problem,  vainly  trying  to  identify  and  distinguish 


126  The  Orthocratic  State 

the  different  causes  that  may  or  may  not  have  con- 
tributed to  a  complex  evil  result,  when  it  can  more 
easily  and  much  sooner  remove  all  abuses,  and 
with  them  all  civic  problems,  than  it  can  satis- 
factorily or  finally  solve  any  one  problem.  If  the 
patient  is  known  to  have  swallowed  poison,  the 
physician  does  not  spend  much  time  in  diagnosing 
the  case,  but  applies  the  stomach-pump,  and  of 
course  forbids  the  taking  of  more  poison. 

A  difficulty  to  be  encountered  in  considering  any 
one  of  the  problems  of  government  arises  from 
their  essential  interrelation,  the  solution  of  one 
often  involving  that  of  one  or  more  others.  It  is 
not  easy,  for  instance,  to  think  of  any  one  of  them 
that  is  not  in  some  way  related  to  the  problem  of 
poverty.  Be  it  the  problem  of  labour  and  capital, 
of  the  trusts,  of  the  railroads  and  other  branches 
of  public  service,  of  the  currency,  of  graft,  or  of 
so-called  swollen  fortunes,  the  wrong  it  connotes 
tends  to  impoverishment  of  some  of  the  people, 
while  the  problems  of  disease,  vice  and  crime 
necessarily  involve  consideration  of  poverty  both 
as  cause  and  effect  of  the  evils  they  connote. 

Poverty  due  to  indolence,  improvidence,  intem- 
perance, to  vices  of  the  individual,  is  chargeable  to 
government  so  far  only  as  the  State  is  responsible 


Civic  Problems  127 

if  at  all  for  his  having  those  vices.  It  would  not 
be  reasonable,  however,  to  assume  that  poverty  is 
always  due  to  such  causes  when  others  are  known 
to  exist.  Long-continued  or  oft-repeated  idleness 
whether  voluntary  or  enforced  will  impoverish  all 
who  depend  upon  their  labour  for  support,  as  will 
also  an  insufficient  wage  however  industrious  and 
saving  the  worker,  and  it  therefore  devolves  upon 
the  State  to  inquire  whether  it  is  in  any  degree 
responsible  for  the  enforced  idleness  or  insufficient 
wage  and  consequent  poverty  of  any  man. 

If  the  enjoyment  of  natural  opportunities  for 
self -employment  as  well  as  for  the  sale  of  one's 
labour  were  secure  to  all  men,  the  State  would  not 
be  responsible  for  the  non-employment  of  any. 
On  the  other  hand,  if  that  employment  be  not 
secured  to  all  it  is  impossible  to  know  how  many 
are  for  that  reason  disemployed  or  underpaid,  or 
to  what  extent  the  State  is  therefore  answerable 
for  existing  poverty.  The  only  way  to  be  assured 
that  it  is  not  at  all  so  responsible  is  to  provide  that 
no  man  shall  be  in  any  way  deprived  of  such  en- 
joyment. That,  as  already  seen,  the  State  has  not 
yet  done,  but,  on  the  contrary,  has  itself  deprived 
the  great  majority  of  men  not  only  of  natural  op- 
portunities for  self -employment  but  also  of  a  nat- 


128  The  Orthocratic  State 

ural  market  for  the  sale  of  labour.  It  is  of  course 
impossible  to  know  to  what  extent  poverty  is  due 
to  these  causes,  nor  is  it  necessary  to  know;  they 
can  not  fail  to  have  their  effect,  and  even  if  there 
were  no  problem  of  poverty,  no  poverty  even,  it 
would  nevertheless  be  the  duty  of  the  State  to  see 
that  no  man  is  by  any  other  man  or  by  the  State 
itself  denied  any  natural  opportunity  for  self-sup- 
port or  for  the  pursuit  of  happiness. 

It  has  been  seen  that  the  holding  of  land  as  by 
right  of  property  not  only  deprives  the  majority 
of  men  of  their  natural  and  only  opportunity  for 
self -employment,  but  destroys  the  natural  market 
for  the  sale  of  labour.  Denied  access  to  land,  men 
who  would  otherwise  be  not  only  self-employers 
but  eventually  buyers  of  other  men's  labour,  are 
forced  into  the  ranks  of  those  who  must  seek  to 
sell  their  labour.  Owing  to  this  artificial.  State- 
enforced  increase  in  the  supply  of  wage  labour  as 
well  as  decrease  in  the  demand  for  it,  there  are 
oftentimes,  if  not  always,  more  would-be  sellers 
than  can  find  buyers  at  any  price,  no  matter  how 
low  the  market  may  fall.  It  is  from  the  hard 
conditions  of  such  unnatural,  State-imposed 
market,  still  further  demoralised  by  other  govern- 
mental interferences,  that  arise  wasteful,  peace- 


Civic  Problems  129 

disturbing  conflicts  between  labour  and  capital,  or, 
correctly  speaking,  between  the  sellers  and  the 
buyers  of  labour,  as  well  as  among  the  sellers 
themselves.  The  employer  of  labour  is  forced  to 
buy  it  as  low  as  it  can  be  bought  by  others  or  be 
driven  from  the  competitive  field,  while  the  em- 
ploye feels  compelled  to  combine  with  others  for 
protection  against  the  competition  of  fellow  toilers 
who  to  save  life  are  eager  to  sell  their  labour  even 
for  less  than  a  living  wage. 

Responsibility  of  the  citizen  for  this  virtual 
destruction  of  all  freedom  of  contract  for  the  sale 
of  labour,  is  not  to  be  escaped  through  any  show 
of  righteous  indignation  at  the  however  wrongful 
interference  of  hard-pressed  union-labourers  with 
such  pitiful  remnant  of  that  freedom  as  may  re- 
main to  their  non-union  competitors.  No  offence 
for  which  the  State  punishes  the  striking  wage- 
worker  is  to  be  compared  with  the  prior  wrong, 
the  strike-causing  abuse,  of  which  the  State  and 
every  citizen  consenting  thereto  are  guilty.  The 
State  should  at  once  begin  the  work  so  long  and 
stupidly  delayed  of  restoring  to  all  men  that  equal 
enjoyment  of  natural  opportunities  for  self-em- 
ployment of  which  they  are  deprived  by  the 
legalised  holding  of  land  as  if  it  were  property. 


130  The  Orthocratic  State 

That  can  be  accomplished  only  by  appropriating 
land  values  to  public  rather  than  private  uses. 
Whether  restoration  of  the  land  to  the  people 
would  wholly  solve  the  problems  of  labour  and 
capital,  is  not  to  the  point;  they  can  not  be  solved 
without  such  restoration,  and  even  if  they  could 
the  governmental  absurdity  and  State-stultifying 
abuse  of  legalised  land  monopoly  should  no  longer 
be  tolerated,  for  it  involves  greater  injustice  and 
more  far-reaching  wrong  than  any  the  State  un- 
dertakes to  prevent. 

It  is,  moreover,  only  through  righting  of  this 
wrong  that  can  come  any  solution  of  the  problem 
of  taxation.  The  appropriation  of  land  values 
to  public  uses  will  afford  the  State  a  just  revenue 
amply  sufficient  for  all  its  needs,  doing  away 
with  all  complaint  of  inequitable  and  burden- 
some taxes,  with  all  necessity  for  borrowing,  and 
eventually  with  the  demoralising  embarrassment 
of  a  public  debt.  The  time  will  come  when  there 
will  be  no  man  or  class  of  men,  no  part  of  the 
people,  richer  than  the  State,  the  whole  of  the 
people;  when  the  State  will  be  able  to  pay  as  it 
goes,  without  asking  for  or  interfering  with  the 
wealth  of  any  man,  even  after  he  is  dead  and  un- 
able to  protest.     Another  result  of  treating  nat- 


Civic  Problems  131 

ural  opportunities  not  as  wealth,  but  as  its  com- 
mon source,  will  be  the  disappearance  of  industrial 
panics,  for  when  industry  shall  be  no  longer 
arrested  and  held  up  by  periodic  or  other  specula- 
tive inflations  of  land  values,  its  operation  will  be 
as  continuous  and  uninterrupted  as  the  continuing 
and  ever  increasing  wants  of  the  people. 

In  considering  the  disappointment,  inconven- 
ience and  possible  hardship  that  landholders  and 
the  holders  of  securities  based  upon  land  values 
may  experience  by  reason  of  appropriating  those 
values  to  their  just  and  proper  use,  it  will  be 
borne  in  mind  not  only  that  persons  liable  to  such 
hardship  will  be  few  in  comparison  with  the  vast 
number  of  those  now  unjustly  expropriated  from 
the  land,  but  also  that  their  hardships  will  be  less 
severe  as  well  as  more  readily  escaped  than  those 
imposed  upon  the  victims  of  land  monopoly; 
further,  that  while  in  the  one  case  the  hardships 
are  necessarily  incident  to  the  righting  of  a  great 
civic  wrong;  in  the  other  they  are  the  inevitable 
result  of  its  continuance;  further  yet,  that  in  one 
case  they  will  become  fewer  and  fewer  until  they 
finally  disappear,  while  in  the  other  they  must  in- 
crease in  number  and  severity  as  long  as  the  wrong 
shall  continue;  and,  further  still,  that  the  neces- 


132  The  Orthocratic  State 

sarily  gradual  change  from  private  to  public  use 
of  land  values  will  be  accompanied  by  such  im- 
provement in  economic  conditions  as  to  reduce  in- 
dustrial hardships  to  a  minimum.  Moreover,  the 
State  will  then  be  able  to  provide  for  the  decent, 
comfortable  support  of  all  persons  for  any  reason 
incapable  of  self-support,  for  it  will  not  have  to 
provide  as  now  for  that  much  greater  number  who 
will  for  the  first  time  become  self-supporting  and 
a  help  rather  than  a  burden  to  the  State  when  no 
longer  denied  natural  opportunities  to  be  so.  Nor 
will  provision  which  the  State  shall  then  miake  for 
the  unfortunate  carry  with  it  any  suggestion  of 
almsgiving,  for  it  will  not  be  made  out  of  the 
means  or  at  the  expense  of  any  individual,  but 
from  land  values,  from  that  social  fund  to  whose 
maintenance  there  are  no  contributions,  either  vol- 
untary or  enforced,  of  individual  or  private 
wealth. 

It  is  evident  that  in  dealing  with  the  mixed 
problems  of  land  monopoly  and  taxation,  which 
are  seen  to  underlie  so  many  other  problems,  the 
State  must  of  necessity  choose  between  two 
courses  of  deliberate  action;  the  one  involving  no 
injustice,  but  merely  the  temporary  hardships 
necessarily  incident  to  the  righting  of  a  great  and 


Civic  Problems  133 

long-continued  civic  wrong,  hardships,  however, 
which  will  be  felt  only  for  a  time,  and  by  only  a 
few  of  the  people,  and  from  whose  severity  the 
State  may  well  afford  relief;  the  other  involving 
the  positive  injustice  of  continuing  that  wrong, 
and  with  it  the  ever  enduring  hardship  which  it 
entails  upon  a  vast  and  ever  increasing  majority 
of  the  people,  and  from  whose  severity,  and  count- 
less evil  results  to  the  whole  people,  the  State  can 
afford  no  adequate  relief  so  long  as  the  wrong 
shall  continue.  Along  which  of  these  two  only 
courses,  in  which  direction,  lies  the  path  of  civic 
righteousness  sometimes  thought  so  hard  to  find, 
is  a  question  to  be  answered  by  every  citizen  for 
himself. 

The  problem  of  the  trusts  is  so  recent  as  to 
suggest  the  likelihood  of  its  being  due  to  some 
comparatively  recent  cause,  and  yet  attempts  at 
its  solution  have  been  as  usual  directed  mainly 
to  consideration  of  effects  rather  than  causes. 
Nor  are  the  difficulties  inevitably  to  be  encoun- 
tered in  attempts  so  made  by  any  means  wanting 
in  this  instance.  It  is  contended  on  the  one  hand 
that  the  trusts  are  not  an  evil,  and  on  the  other 
that  they  are  wholly  so.  Some  say  that  there  are 
good  and  bad  trusts  and  that  the  latter  should  be 


134  The  Ortliocratic  State 

regulated,  but  with  little  agreement  as  to  how  they 
should  be  regulated,  while  some  contend  that  there 
is  no  just  regulation  possible,  no  right  way  of 
doing  wrong,  even  by  rule. 

If  the  trusts  are  wrong  it  must  be  for  the  rea- 
son that  they  wrong  somebody,  that  is,  that  they 
interfere  with  individual  enjoyment  of  some  one 
or  more  of  the  natural  rights  of  man,  for  in  no 
other  way  can  any  man  be  wronged.  It  is  claimed 
on  one  side  that  trusts  wrong  the  people  by  ex- 
torting through  monopoly  and  restraint  of  trade 
an  exorbitant  price  for  commodities  in  which 
they  deal,  and  on  the  other  that  through  economies 
made  possible  by  combination  they  reduce  prices. 
But  who  shall  say  what  is  a  just  price  for  any 
commodity  when  there  is  no  natural  market  for  the 
sale  and  no  free  competition  in  the  manufacture  of 
it?  The  price  may  seem  so  high  that  one  feels  he 
is  being  robbed,  or  so  low  that  he  knows  some  one 
else  has  been,  but  what  is  a  just  price  neither  he 
nor  anybody  else  can  determine  under  existing 
conditions.  For  the  sake  of  peace  government 
may  decree  what  shall  be  a  legal  price,  but  the 
price  so  fixed  may  in  spite  of  best  intent  and  en- 
deavour be  as  far  from  just  as  are  the  conditions 
which    render    governmental    action    necessary. 


Civic  Problems  135 

Neither  the  statutory  nor  the  commercial  rate  of 
interest  is  a  reliable  index,  since  the  one  is  arbi- 
trary and  may  be  too  high  or  too  low  for  all  any 
one  can  tell,  while  the  other  is  no  less  subject 
than  other  prices  to  inequitable  influences  that 
obtain  in  an  unnatural  market. 

But  the  evil  that  the  trusts  may  do  is  not  con- 
fined to  the  enhancement  of  prices.  The  people 
are  interested  not  more  in  buying  at  a  fair  price 
than  in  producing  wherewith  to  buy,  and  if  the 
trusts  interfere  with  individual  enjoyment  of 
whatever  of  natural  opportunity  for  the  produc- 
tion of  wealth  survives  the  encroachments  of  land 
monopoly  and  other  privileges,  they  are  an  evil 
even  though  they  may  reduce  prices.  If  a  result- 
ing reduction  in  prices  were  to  be  held  sufficient 
warrant  for  the  grant  of  privileges  tending  to  de- 
stroy natural  competition,  there  would  be  no  rea- 
son why  a  still  further  reduction  should  not  be 
held  to  warrant  its  total  destruction,  even  through 
State  monopoly  of  all  the  means  of  production. 

Land  monopoly,  which  is  by  no  means  confined 
to  the  holding  of  land  for  private  uses  but  includes 
the  private  holding  of  railroads  and  other  rights 
of  way  in  their  nature  public,  is  so  clearly  de- 
structive of  natural  competition  that  it  is  some- 


136  The  Orthocratic  State 

times  thought  to  constitute,  together  with  tariff, 
patent-right,  and  certain  money  privileges,  the  en- 
tire composite  trust  evil.  But  while  it  is  true 
that  such  monopoly  and  privileges  are  so  largely 
exploited  as  to  be  almost  monopolised  by  the 
trusts,  it  is  not  upon  them  that  the  combinations 
under  consideration  depend  for  their  distinctive 
character,  nor  would  the  abolition  of  that  monop- 
oly and  of  those  privileges  wholly  destroy  the 
trusts  or  deprive  them  of  their  peculiar  power  for 
injury. 

A  combination  or  trust  is  of  course  reprehensible 
whenever  and  only  when  the  individuals  compos- 
ing it  are  so  combined  as  to  have  an  unnatural 
advantage  over  their  actual  or  would-be  competi- 
tors in  business.  It  has  been  seen,  however,  that 
the  natural  and  therefore  beneficent  tendency  to 
combine  is  so  evenly  balanced  by  opposing  tend- 
encies and  natural  hindrances  as  to  prevent  un- 
privileged natural  combinations  becoming  so 
large  or  powerful  as  to  be  permanently  monopolis- 
tic. However  extended  a  partnership  may  be- 
come, so  long  as  it  is  unprivileged  there  will  be 
others  able  and  willing  to  cope  with  it.  What- 
ever restraint  such  associations  may  exert  wrongs 
no  man  unless  by  direct  illegal  interference  with 


Civic  Problems  137 

some  natural  right,  against  which  collective  ag- 
gression the  State  should  of  course  afford  protec- 
tion the  same  as  if  it  were  individual.  There  is 
no  wrong  in  unprivileged  combination  and  co- 
operation for  the  production  of  wealth.  If  two 
men  have  a  right  to  combine,  so  have  hundreds 
or  thousands,  as  far  as  they  can  without  privilege, 
and,  as  already  seen,  it  is  not  in  the  nature  of 
things,  not  in  human  nature,  for  unprivileged 
combinations  so  to  extend  and  continue  as  to  mo- 
nopolise any  field  of  industry.  The  reprehensible 
trust  is  therefore  never  a  natural  association,  but 
always  a  corporation  or  combination  of  corpora- 
tions, and  could  not  maintain  its  integrity  with- 
out the  cohesive  force  of  corporate  privilege, 
which  indeed  constitutes  its  essentially  distinctive 
characteristic. 

That  corporations  have  abnormal  power  will 
hardly  be  questioned.  As  said  by  the  Supreme 
Court  of  Tennessee:  "Great  corporations  may 
do  great  mischief  and  wrong;  may  make  and 
break  merchants  at  will;  may  crush  out  competi- 
tion, limit  employment  and  foster  monopolies, 
and  thus  greatly  injure  individuals  and  the  public; 
but  power  is  inherent  in  size  and  strength,  num- 
bers and  wealth,  and  the  law  can  not  set  bounds 


138  The  Orthocratic  State 

to  it  unless  it  is  exercised  unlawfully."  If  that 
be,  as  it  seems,  correct  statement  of  fact  and 
sound  conclusion  of  law,  by  what  just  warrant 
does  the  State  assume  to  increase  the  strength  of 
this  or  that  body  of  men,  as  it  does  by  every  act 
of  incorporation?  Every  corporation  however 
small  owes  more  or  less  of  whatever  strength  or 
power  it  has  to  the  privilege  of  incorporation,  and 
to  that  extent  embodies  the  characteristic  privi- 
lege and  evil  of  the  larger  corporation  or  trust. 
By  means  of  their  peculiar  advantages,  one  of 
which  is  the  control  of  capital  in  such  way  and 
to  such  amount  as  to  warrant  risking  some  part 
of  it  in  underselling  unprivileged  competitors,  cor- 
porations have  gradually  driven  natural  persons 
out  of  almost  every  considerable  branch  of  busi- 
ness. This  has  been  as  surely  in  restraint  of  trade 
as  it  is  for  the  trust  to  undersell  and  so  crush  out 
competing  corporations.  The  wrong  in  either 
case  consists  not  so  much  in  the  underselling,  which 
is  not  in  and  of  itself  any  infringement  of  natural 
right,  as  in  granting  the  privilege  without  which 
such  underselling  could  not  be  safely  undertaken. 
Trade  is  restrained  whenever  and  only  when  some- 
body is  restrained  from  trading.  Natural  com- 
petition is  merely  the  exercise  of  economic  free- 


Civic  Problems  139 

dom,  and  consists  in  the  unrestricted,  unprivileged 
and  commendable  endeavour  of  natural  persons  to 
render  each  the  most  acceptable  and  readily  ex- 
changeable service  to  his  fellow  men.  To  ex- 
clude any  man  from  natural  opportunities  for  such 
endeavour,  or  to  subject  him  to  any  artificial, 
State-imposed  disadvantages  in  the  making  of  it, 
is  restraint  of  trade  as  unjust  and  as  unreasonable 
as  any  that  can  obtain,  and  is  none  the  less  un- 
reasonable or  unjust  because  unconsciously  im- 
posed and  ignorantly  borne. 

The  trust  is  but  the  logical,  inevitable  outcome 
of  granting  corporate  privilege.  By  forcing  nat- 
ural persons  out  of  the  competitive  field,  corpora- 
tions first  destroy  whatever  of  natural  competition 
until  then  obtains  in  spite  of  land  monopoly  and 
other  privileges.  Then  follows  the  only  compe- 
tition possible  among  artificial  persons,  a  compe- 
tition as  unnatural  as  the  competitors,  governed 
and  governable  by  no  natural  law.  The  cor- 
porations must  either  combine  or  go  on  cutting  one 
another's  throats,  but  whichever  they  do  the  trust 
is  inevitable,  for  if  the  throat-cutting  continues 
it  must  sooner  or  later  result  in  the  defeat  of  all 
but  the  one  victorious  and  dominating  corpora- 
tion left  in  control  of  the  field,  and  so  holding  as 


140  The  Orthocratic  State 

great  a  monopoly  as  any  to  be  acquired  through 
combination.  There  is  some  excuse,  seeming 
necessity  even,  for  the  combinations  called  trusts, 
their  object  being  to  avoid  a  self-destructive  com- 
petition; but  there  is  no  excuse  to  be  offered  for 
creating  the  corporation,  which  is  not  only  un- 
necessary to  the  performance  of  any  governmental 
function  but  is  in  and  of  itself  necessarily  de- 
structive of  the  natural  competition  essential  to 
industrial  liberty.  Outcry  of  the  corporation 
against  encroachment  of  the  trust  is  heard  be- 
cause of  a  vocal  potency  that  comes  with  privilege. 
The  plaint  of  the  individual,  the  natural  person, 
as  he  goes  down  perhaps  before  that  same  corpora- 
tion, is  too  faint  to  be  heard,  and  he  helplessly, 
hopelessly,  takes  his  place  in  the  already  over- 
crowded ranks  of  those  who  are  forced,  not  by 
any  natural  law  or  evolutionary  process  but  by 
abuse  of  the  power  of  the  State,  to  offer  their 
labour  in  a  market  where  the  State  neither  buys 
nor  compels  any  one  to  buy. 

Corporate  privilege  was  originally  presumed  to 
be  granted  only  "for  the  advantage  of  the  public," 
the  Courts  holding  until  times  quite  recent  that 
the  purpose  of  incorporation  should  always  be 
"the  accomplishment  of  some  public  good."    The 


Civic  Problems  141 

theory  was  stated  by  the  Supreme  Court  of  the 
United  States  some  years  ago  as  follows:  "The 
wants  of  the  public  are  often  so  imperative  that 
a  duty  is  imposed  on  government  to  provide  for 
them ;  and  as  experience  has  proved  that  the  State 
should  not  attempt  directly  to  do  this,  it  is  neces- 
sary to  confer  on  others  the  faculty  of  doing  what 
the  sovereign  power  is  unwilling  to  undertake." 
More  recent  experience  goes  to  prove,  as  far  as 
it  is  possible  to  prove  what  is  self-evident,  that 
the  State  should  not  attempt  to  do  its  duty  in 
any  other  way  than  directly.  The  railroad  and 
other  public-service  problems  are  the  result  of 
conferring  on  others  the  faculty  of  doing  what  the 
sovereign  power  has  seemed  unwilling  to  under- 
take, and  their  solution  awaits  the  time  when  the 
State  shall  be  willing  to  do  its  duty. 

Whether  industrial  corporations,  those  formed 
for  the  prosecution  of  private  business,  have  been 
"for  the  advantage  of  the  public,"  is  a  question 
which  would  seem  to  be  sufficiently  answered  by 
the  problem  of  the  trusts.  The  Government  has 
at  last  deemed  it  necessary  to  assume  such  control 
of  their  affairs  as  it  would  never  be  necessary  or 
proper  for  it  to  exercise  over  the  business  of  natu- 
ral persons;  a  control,  however,  which  the  larger 


142  The  Orthocratic  State 

corporations  may  welcome  in  the  not  unreasonable 
expectation  that  it  will  maintain  them  in  the  now 
doubly  legalised  and  judicially  reinforced  enjoy- 
ment of  already  virtually  all-encompassing  privi- 
leges, free  from  all  further  worries  whether  of 
competition  or  of  combination,  for  the  corpora- 
tions will  hardly  be  lacking  in  power  to  direct 
whatever  control  of  their  overgrown  affairs  they 
compel  the  State  to  assume.  In  view  of  the  diffi- 
culty government  has  always  had  in  controlling 
natural  persons,  what  reason  is  there  for  presuming 
that  it  will  ever  be  able  effectually  to  control  the 
so  much  more  powerful  ones  of  its  own,  Franken- 
stein-like creation?  A  corporation  that  does  no- 
body any  harm  will  do  nobody  any  good.  There 
is  no  natural  law  nor  can  man  prescribe  any 
equitable  rule  for  the  conduct  of  unnatural  per- 
sons. There  is  no  rule  of  reason  applicable  to 
things  intrinsically  unreasonable. 

Solution  of  the  trust  problem  must  abide  the 
time  when  the  State  shall  realise  that  it  can  not 
create  artificial  persons  without  infringing  the 
rights  of  natural  persons.  As  it  has  had  to  dis- 
solve the  trust  by  resolving  it  into  its  constituent 
corporations,  so  will  it  eventually  have  to  resolve 
the  latter  into  the  individual  natural  persons  of 


Civic  Problems  ^  143 

whom  they  are  respectively  composed.  The  al- 
ternative is  State  socialism,  toward  which  the  at- 
tempted regulation  of  corporations  by  government 
now  tends.  Their  power  for  injury  may,  how- 
ever, be  meanwhile  greatly  diminished  by  the 
abolition  of  privileges  which  they  now  exploit  in 
common  with  any  natural  persons  not  as  yet  driven 
from  fields  of  such  exploitation;  for,  as  already 
observed,  corporations  tend  to  monopolise  not 
only  natural  opportunities  for  the  production  of 
wealth,  but  also  all  privileges,  or  State-given  ad- 
vantages of  inequitable  appropriation.  They  are 
quivers  of  privilege  in  which  to  gather  and  carry 
all  the  arrows  of  privilege. 

That  many  industries  have  come  to  be  con- 
ducted on  a  larger  scale  than  individuals  or  even 
partnerships  would  be  able  to  maintain  does  not 
prove  that  they  ought  to  be  so  carried  on.  Their 
present  gigantic  proportions  are  as  unnecessary 
and  abnormal  as  the  privilege  to  which  they  owe 
their  enormous  expansion.  And  yet  it  should  be 
remembered  that  there  is  nothing  reprehensible  in 
mere  magnitude  even  of  business,  for  when  due 
as  it  may  be  to  natural  causes  alone  it  is  itself 
natural  and  therefore  right.  When  it  is  really  a 
symptom  of  economic  disease,  and  it  can  never  be 


144  The  Orthocratic  State 

more  than  a  symptom,  the  corrective  treatment 
should  be  applied  to  the  disease  rather  than  to  the 
symptom.  The  evils  of  a  privileged  and  there- 
fore abnormally  expanded  business  are  not  to  be 
remedied  by  reducing  the  magnitude  of  its  opera- 
tions.    To  scatter  a  disorder  is  not  to  cure  it. 

If  there  be  any  necessary  undertakings  which 
can  not  be  conducted  without  the  privilege  of  in- 
corporation, it  is  evident  that  they  are  not  private 
but  public  in  their  nature,  and  should  be  carried 
on  by  the  State,  the  only  corporation  that  can 
justly  be  maintained,  other  corporations  being 
but  its  irregular  and  vicious  progeny.  If  any  in- 
dustry necessary  to  an  equitable  public  order  be 
indeed  in  the  nature  of  things  beyond  the  com- 
pass of  unprivileged  private  enterprise,  it  is  clearly 
one  in  which  natural  persons  have  no  right  to  en- 
gage. That  any  really  private  industry  as  car- 
ried on  by  corporations  has  become  too  unwieldy 
for  natural  persons  or  associations  to  conduct,  does 
not,  however,  make  it  a  public  service,  but  is 
merely  evidence  of  unnatural,  privileged  combina- 
tion and  that  the  industry  should  revert  to  the 
control  of  natural  persons,  who  have  a  natural 
right  to  engage  in  its  prosecution  and  will  gladly 
do  so  when  no  longer  prevented  by  the  restraint  of 


Civic  Problems  145 

corporate  privilege.  Dissolution  of  the  corpora- 
tions and  virtual  abolition  of  the  privilege  of  in- 
corporation might  be  effected  through  imposition 
of  a  sufficiently  drastic  tax  on  the  privilege,  pro- 
vided shifting  of  the  tax  from  the  privilege  to  the 
public  were  prevented,  but  as  that  would  require 
government  regulation  of  prices  the  remedy  would 
be  worse  than  the  disease. 

The  currency  question  seems  more  nearly  than 
any  other  to  approach  the  perplexity  of  a  problem. 
It  is  clear  that  the  legalised  medium  of  exchange 
should  be  issued  and  controlled  by  the  State,  but 
not  so  clear  what  it  should  be.  If  it  be  a  metallic 
currency,  a  certain  weight,  of  gold  or  silver  for 
instance,  is  made  the  unstable  unit,  the  ever  shrink- 
ing or  expanding  and  therefore  unreliable  and  in- 
equitable measure  of  value;  while  a  paper  cur- 
rency, by  which  the  State  undertakes  or  guaran- 
tees the  payment  of  gold  or  silver,  has  the  addi- 
tional imperfection  of  being  exposed  to  the  danger 
that  the  State  may  not  be  at  all  times  able  to  keep 
its  promise,  the  gold  or  silver  not  being  always 
readily  obtainable. 

A  legalised  medium  of  exchange  should  bear 
evidence  that  the  holder  has  parted  with  value  to 
the  amount  indicated,  and  is  legally  entitled  to  a 


146  The  Orthocratic  State 

generally  transferable  hand-to-hand  credit  there- 
for. The  abstract  unit  by  which  the  value  is 
measured  and  known  must  necessarily  be  appre- 
hended and  identified  in  the  first  instance  as  being 
equal  to  the  then  value  of  some  definite  quantity 
of  something  having  value,  of  silver  or  gold  for 
instance,  but  it  is  no  more  a  unit  of  silver  or  gold 
value  than  of  any  other,  for  if  it  is  to  be  a  fixed 
and  unvarying  measure  of  value,  it  must  be  and  re- 
main independent  of  all  values  and  unaffected  by 
any.  Once  it  has  been  identified  and  adopted 
there  is  no  necessity  for  its  being  thereafter  tied  to 
or  influenced  by  the  value  of  any  particular  com- 
modity, nor  can  it  be  without  losing  its  identity. 
Whenever,  whether  for  purposes  of  approximate 
identification  or  for  any  other  reason,  it  is  made 
to  follow  the  value  of  the  metal  or  other  commod- 
ity used  in  making  the  original  identification,  it 
sooner  or  later  becomes  a  different  unit  and  value 
from  that  originally  selected,  and  the  value  of  the 
currency  will  consequently  shrink  or  expand  as  the 
case  may  be,  as  will  also  all  credits  measured  in 
terms  of  the  currency. 

In  order  that  the  unit  selected  may  remain  a 
fixed  and  reliable  measure  of  value,  it  must  be  al- 
lowed to  do  the  measuring  and  not  be  itself  sub- 


Civic  Problems  147 

ject  to  a  measurement  which  means  continual 
modification.  Its  delicate  functionings  should 
not  be  disturbed  by  any  changes  in  the  value  of 
this  or  that  commodity,  of  gold  or  silver.  If  those 
metals  were  wholly  to  disappear,  values  and  units 
of  value  would  still  remain,  and  any  unit  in  use 
could  be  easily  identified  and  continued  in  use 
without  reference  to  the  value  of  any  particular 
commodity;  for,  at  any  time  after  that  abstract 
entity,  a  unit  of  value,  a  dollar  for  instance,  has 
once  begun  to  measure  the  values  of  those  no  less 
abstract  entities  known  as  debts  and  credits,  and 
measured  in  dollars,  that  unit  or  dollar  will,  if 
permitted,  continue  its  unchanging  measurement 
not  only  of  those  values  but  also  of  the  values  of 
all  commodities  and  services,  since  it  is  in  such 
commodities  and  services  tliat  debts  are  in  reality 
finally  paid. 

If  the  State  should  on  a  certain  day  call  in  all 
the  legalised  money  in  circulation,  redeeming  all 
or  as  much  of  it  as  might  be  voluntarily  sur- 
rendered, and  in  exchange  therefor  should  issue 
dollar  for  dollar  a  paper  currency  receivable  in 
payment  for  all  dues  public  and  private,  and 
thereafter  constituting  the  only  legal-tender 
money,  the  value  of  a  dollar  as  of  that  day  and 


148  The  Orthocratic  State 

as  indicated  by  such  currency  would  continue  to 
be  the  unit  by  which  that  currency  would  measure 
all  values  including  the  values  of  silver  and  gold; 
for  a  dollar  of  such  currency,  being  made  receiv- 
able in  payment  and  satisfaction  of  any  dollar 
of  then  existing  indebtedness,  would  be  thereby 
arrested  and  thereafter  held  by  continuing  to  be 
so  received.  In  other  words,  the  abstract  unit 
and  measure  of  value  obtaining  on  the  day  the 
currency  was  issued  and  then  measuring  the  values 
of  all  credits,  and  of  all  existing  indebtedness 
whether  matured  or  not,  would  be  and  continue  to 
be  the  unit  and  measure  by  which  such  currency 
would  thereafter  serve  to  transfer  such  credits 
and  to  pay  such  indebtedness  as  it  should  from 
time  to  time  mature,  as  well  as  the  unit  by  which 
it  would  measure  values  involved  in  obligations 
incurred  after  issue  of  the  currency  and  payable 
therein.  A  dollar  of  such  currency  would  not  be 
subject  to  fluctuations  in  the  value  of  gold,  of 
silver  or  of  any  other  commodity,  but  would  be 
and  remain,  as  it  should,  a  purely  abstract  and  at 
the  same  time  stable  unit  for  measurement  of  the 
values  of  all  commodities  and  services,  as  well  as 
legal  evidence  of  the  holder's  title  to  a  general 
credit  for  the  value  indicated. 


Civic  Problems  ^         149 

Such  a  currency  will  not  be  a  promise  to  pay, 
made  perhaps  to  be  broken,  but  a  governmental 
undertaking  and  assurance  that  it  shall  and  will 
be  receivable  in  all  payments,  whether  to  the 
State  or  to  its  individual  members.  It  will  be  as 
safe  and  sound  as  the  State  itself  or  as  any  bonds 
the  State  can  issue,  while  every  holder  of  it  and 
every  creditor  whether  of  the  State  or  of  its  citi- 
zens will  be  conscious  of  personal,  pecuniary  in- 
terest in  maintaining  the  integrity  of  government. 
It  will,  moreover,  never  leave  the  territory  of  the 
State,  in  which  it  should  remain,  like  any  other 
public  utility,  unaffected  by  monetary  vicissitudes 
of  other  States.  With  such  a  currency  in  use, 
gold  and  silver,  not  being  required  for  legal-tender 
uses,  would  be  more  readily  obtainable  than  now 
for  any  purposes  of  domestic  or  foreign  trade  as 
well  as  for  meeting  existing  obligations  calling 
for  payment  in  those  metals.  The  volume  of  the 
currency,  automatically  adjusted  through  collec- 
tion and  expenditure  of  the  public  revenue,  would 
always  be  such  as  to  preclude  any  danger  of  insuffi- 
ciency in  the  quantity  of  money  in  circulation, 
while  every  dollar  of  it,  however  large  the  volume 
in  circulation,  would  represent  and  call  for  the 
value  for  which  it  was  originally  issued.    Being  is- 


150  The  Orthocratic  State 

sued  always  and  only  for  value  received,  that  is, 
first  in  exchange  for  money  in  circulation  at  the 
time  of  issuing  the  currency  and  afterwards  only 
in  payment  for  commodities  and  services  furnished 
the  State,  and  accepted  in  payment  of  public  reve- 
nues as  well  as  in  discharge  of  private  obligations, 
such  a  currency  would  serve  all  the  purposes  of 
an  equitable  legal-tender  money. 

With  the  business  of  banking,  when  limited  to 
the  borrowing  and  lending  of  money,  the  State 
has  properly  no  more  concern  than  with  any  other 
private  enterprise,  its  duty  in  that  regard  being 
done  when  it  protects  bankers  and  their  customers, 
as  it  should  everybody  else,  from  fraud  or  violence. 
If  provision  for  the  safe  deposit  of  money,  or  for 
convenient  transmission  of  money  or  of  credits, 
be  necessary  to  equitable  functioning  of  the  cur- 
rency, and  can  not  be  had  without  the  aid  of  gov- 
ernment, the  State  should  of  course  itself  make 
such  provision. 

In  considering  the  problem  of  swollen  or  ex- 
orbitant fortunes,  question  arises  as  to  what  the 
State  has  to  do  with  any  man's  fortune  if  it  be 
indeed  his.  If  the  mere  magnitude  of  it  may 
warrant  interference  by  government,  how  many 
millions  may  be  accumulated  without  incurring 


Civic  Problems  151 

such  liability'?  Is  still  further  accumulation  per- 
missible provided  the  excess  be  appropriated  to 
beneficent  uses,  or  is  it  presumed  that  possessions 
beyond  the  limit  do  not  rightfully  belong  to  their 
possessor ;  that  they  are  not  his  even  to  give  away, 
but  ought  to  be  restored  to  their  rightful  owners? 
If  so,  may  not  the  unjust  accumulation  have  been 
going  on  so  long  that  it  is  now  somewhat  too  late 
to  indemnify  or  even  to  identify  those  whose  sub- 
stance has  gone  to  swell  the  fortune? 

The  amount  of  a  man's  wealth  may  indeed  be 
so  great  as  to  suggest  the  improbability  of  its  hav- 
ing been  equitably  accumulated,  but  can  hardly 
be  taken  as  proof  that  it  was  not  legally  acquired. 
If  so  acquired  it  would  ill  become  the  State  to 
deprive  him  of  it  so  long  as  the  methods  by  which 
he  acquired  it  continue  to  receive  the  approval  of 
government.  In  so  doing,  the  State  would  in 
effect  say  to  the  man:  "The  methods  b)^  which 
you  have  acquired  the  great  wealth  you  possess 
though  legal  are  so  clearly  inequitable  that  you 
will  not  be  permitted  to  retain  the  entire  amount 
of  it,  it  having  become  the  policy  of  the  State 
to  limit  the  extent  to  which  one  may  go  on  ap- 
propriating wealth  belonging  to  others,  to  the  end 
that  there  may  seem  to  be  no  monopoly  of  that 


152  The  Orthocratic  State 

privilege.  If  you  had  spent  the  wealth  as  you 
acquired  it,  as  others  may  have  done  even  to  a 
larger  amount  than  you  have  imprudently  saved, 
nothing  might  have  been  said,  for  although  the 
wrong  done  to  the  rightful  owners  would  have 
been  the  same  it  would  have  attracted  little  if 
any  attention.  Others  are  to  be  sure  making  use 
of  the  same  inequitable  but  legal  methods  of  ac- 
cumulation, as  they  must  if  they  are  to  succeed 
or  even  engage  in  business,  but  it  is  to  be  hoped 
that  they  will  take  warning  from  your  case  and 
not  carry  the  joke  too  far."  It  is  evidently  any- 
thing but  a  scientific  diagnosis  that  assumes  to 
determine  at  what  point  unjust  but  legal  accumu- 
lation of  wealth  passes  from  healthy  growth  to 
abnormal  increase  or  swelling. 

The  problem  in  so  far  as  it  is  at  all  govern- 
mental must  necessarily  involve  more  or  less  of 
what  has  come  to  be  called  graft,  so  named  after 
the  familiar  process  by  which  one  organism  is  en- 
abled to  thrive  on  nourishment  produced  by  an- 
other, upon  which  it  is  said  to  be  grafted.  If  the 
fortune  of  any  man  has  been  to  any  extent  built 
upon  wealth  belonging  to  others,  its  growth  has 
been  so  far  due  to  some  form  of  graft.  If  the 
graft  be  illegal,  the  law  is  presumed  to  provide 


Civic  Problems  \         153 

some  means  for  preventing  it;  if  legal,  the  State 
is  responsible  for  and  should  put  an  end  to  it.  So 
fai'  as  wealth  has  been  lawfully  acquired,  no  mat- 
ter how  inequitable  the  accumulation  or  how  vast 
the  possession,  the  State  can  not  equitably  inter- 
fere with  it,  for  it  can  not  now  be  restored  to 
those  from  whom  it  was  wrongfully  taken. 
Wrongs  suffered  by  men  of  a  past  generation  can 
seldom  be  righted  by  anything  done  by  or  for 
those  of  the  present,  and  small  consolation  to 
those  who  are  being  robbed  in  the  present  is  it 
to  be  told  that  when  they  and  the  robber  are  dead 
the  hoard  he  shall  leave  will  be  taxed  to  re- 
duce the  taxes  of  robbers  still  living. 

But  this  conclusion  by  no  means  disposes  of 
the  problem.  Few  if  any  so-called  fortunes  con- 
sist entirely  or  even  mainly  of  wealth.  They  are 
generally  more  or  less  swollen  with  the  dropsical 
affection  of  privilege,  the  capitalized  value  of 
which  is  accounted  part  of  the  fortune  of  its  posses- 
sor. If  the  State  were  to  grant  to  some  man 
possessed  of  no  wealth  whatever  the  privilege 
thenceforth  to  collect  but  a  penny  a  year  from 
each  of  its  inhabitants,  he  would  be  rated  as  a  man 
of  fortune  although  he  might  not  save  a  dollar 
of  his  income.     And  if  the  privilege  should  be 


154  The  Orthocratic  State 

revoked  the  fortune  would  disappear,  but  the  man 
would  thereby  be  deprived  of  no  wealth.  He 
would  simply  cease  to  appropriate  the  wealth  of 
others.  And  so  of  all  fortunes;  to  whatever  ex- 
tent they  are  based  on  privilege,  to  that  extent 
will  they  be  reduced  by  its  abolition,  and  that 
without  interference  with  any  wealth  of  which 
they  may  be  as  they  generally  are  in  part  com- 
posed. As  a  rule,  however,  the  greater  the  for- 
tune, the  greater  the  proportion  of  privilege  to  be 
found  in  its  make-up.  A  fortune  of  a  hundred 
millions  means  perhaps  sixty  or  seventy  millions 
of  capitalized  privilege,  to  say  nothing  of  any  in- 
equitably but  legally  acquired  wealth  it  may  con- 
tain. Abolish  land  monopoly,  protective  tariffs, 
subsidies  and  patent-rights  so-called,  together  with 
corporate  privileges,  the  State  assuming  control 
of  all  public  utilities,  and  there  will  not  long  re- 
main any  fortunes  so  large  as  to  attract  envious 
attention  or  as  to  enable  their  possessors  to  dom- 
inate the  business  world. 

The  confused  and  seemingly  inexplicable  jum- 
ble of  economic  and  industrial  conditions,  result- 
ing from  governmental  interferences  with  auto- 
matic operation  of  the  natural  laws  of  wealth 


Civic  Problems  155 

production  and  distribution,  has  led  many  to  be- 
lieve that  in  order  to  secure  an  equitable  distribu- 
tion the  State  should  assume  ownership  and  con- 
trol of  all  the  means  of  production  and  distribu- 
tion. The  proposition  necessarily  implies  not 
only  a  present  inequitable  distribution  but  also  the 
possibility  of  making  provision  for  a  just  one.  It 
is  clear,  however,  that  before  the  State  can  make 
such  provision  it  must  determine  what  would  be 
a  just  distribution,  and  to  that  end  must  first  as- 
certain the  natural  law  of  wealth  distribution. 
That  law  can  be  deduced  only  from  the  natural 
laws  of  wealth  production,  for  it  is  impossible  to 
know  how  anything  produced  by  and  belonging  to 
several  owners  ought  to  be  divided  among  them, 
without  first  knowing  what  were  their  respective 
contributions  to  its  production.  Assuming  the 
production  to  have  resulted  from  the  combined 
effort  of  equally  efficient  producers,  it  will  hardly 
be  contended  that  one  who  has  laboured  for  a  day 
only  would  be  justly  entitled  to  as  large  a  share 
as  would  one  who  had  laboured  for  many  days; 
and  even  if  the  proposition  is  to  be  understood  as 
involving  supposition  that  any  distribution  to  be 
made  by  the  State  shall  be  equal,  it  is  of  course 


156  The  Orthocratic  State 

no  less  necessary  to  consider  those  natural  laws, 
in  order  to  determine  whether  such  equal  distribu- 
tion would  be  equitable. 

There  are  two  primary  factors  which  enter  into 
the  production  of  all  wealth,  namely,  land  and 
labour.  If  the  land  has  no  value,  no  superiority 
in  productivity  over  other  land  in  use,  the  product 
is  due  solely  to  labour,  and  belongs  in  its  entirety 
to  the  labourer.  He  owns  it;  it  is  his  to  possess 
and  control,  and  constitutes  his  property,  or  in- 
dividual wealth.  If  the  land  be  valuable,  the 
same  labour  will  produce  thereon  more  wealth 
than  upon  the  land  having  no  value,  but,  since  the 
labourer's  contribution  to  the  product  is  no 
greater  in  the  latter  case  than  in  the  former,  the 
additional  production  is  due  solely  to  his  oc- 
cupancy in  the  latter  case  of  a  better  natural  op- 
portunity than  in  the  former.  And  since  the  ad- 
vantage of  such  occupancy  does  not  belong  to  him 
in  particular  but  to  all  the  people  in  common,  they 
have  a  lien  upon  the  product  for  the  value  due  to 
the  advantage,  a  lien  which  is  discharged  upon 
payment  of  the  rental  value  of  the  land  to  the 
State,  for  the  use  of  the  people. 

The  only  other  factor  in  the  production  of 
wealth  is  capital,  that  is,  any  wealth  used  in  such 


Civic  Problems        ^  157 

production.  It  is  a  secondary  factor  in  that  it  is 
a  product  of  the  two  primary  factors,  but  inas- 
much as  it  is  wealth  belonging  to  somebody  and 
not  always  to  the  labourer,  but  sometimes  to  some 
other  owner  who  consents  to  its  use  on  condition 
that  he  shall  share  in  the  product,  it  becomes 
necessary,  in  order  to  determine  the  latter's  share, 
to  consider  capital  as  a  separate  factor  in  produc- 
tion. 

Whenever  these  three  wealth-producing  factors, 
valuable  land,  labour  and  capital,  enter  into  the 
production  of  any  wealth,  they  contribute  to  its 
value  in  proportion  to  their  respective  values  as 
measured  in  terms  of  rent,  wages  and  interest. 
Under  just  conditions,  those  that  would  obtain  in 
a  natural  market,  whoever  should  make  use  of  all 
of  these  factors,  and  should  have  to  hire  all  the 
labour  but  his  own,  and  to  borrow  all  the  capital 
used,  would,  after  payment  of  rent,  wages  and 
interest,  have  left  of  the  total  value  produced  so 
much  only  as  was  contributed  by  his  own  labour; 
but  would,  however,  by  reason  of  such  payment, 
become  the  individual  owner  of  the  entire  concrete 
product.  If  the  capital  used  were  his  own.  he 
would  of  course  have  to  pay  out  only  rent  and 
wages,  but  the  proportional  distribution  according 


158  The  Orthocratic  State 

to  the  respective  values  of  the  different  factors 
would  be  the  same  in  each  and  every  case. 

Such  a  distribution  of  wealth,  or  of  its  value, 
would  evidently  be  equitable,  nor  is  it  easy  to  con- 
ceive of  any  other  that  would  be  just,  or  of  any 
other  way  of  arriving  at  an  equitable  one.  Any 
distribution  to  be  equitable  must  necessarily  be 
according  to  value,  which  can  be  determined  only 
in  a  natural  market,  where  and  where  alone  it  is 
that  a  just  price,  the  only  reliable  index  of  value, 
whether  of  land,  labour  or  capital,  can  be  ascer- 
tained, and  where  it  is  automatically  adjusted  by 
a  sensitive  measurement  to  be  had  only  through  a 
balancing  of  the  forces  of  supply  and  demand. 
The  natural  law  for  the  production  and  distribu- 
tion of  wealth  is  simply  this, — that  production, 
which  always  includes  any  necessary  exchange, 
shall  be  carried  on  under  conditions  affording 
equal  access  to  and  use  of  natural  opportunities 
for  human  effort  or  labour,  including  freedom  of 
contract  in  the  exchange  of  labour  and  its  prod- 
ucts. 

Under  such  conditions,  the  fact  that  a  man  had 
agreed  to  accept  a  certain  share  of  any  wealth  to 
whose  production  he  had  contributed,  or  a  cer- 
tain wage  or  rate  of  interest,  would  be  prima  facie 


Civic  Problems  159 

evidence  that  such  share,  wage  or  interest  was 
all  to  which  he  was  entitled,  for  he  would  be  sub- 
ject to  no  duress  but  free  to  do  with  his  labour 
and  capital  as  he  pleased.  At  present,  however, 
most  men  are  subject  to  a  duress  imposed  by 
abuses  of  civil  power,  a  duress  of  which  they  may 
not  be  fully  aware,  but  of  whose  resulting  evils 
there  is  happily  a  growing  consciousness.  But 
how  is  the  State  to  remedy  those  evils,  how  can  it 
remove  the  duress,  except  by  discontinuing  the 
abuses^  In  what  other  way  can  it  provide  for  a 
natural,  equitable  distribution  of  wealth?  Cer- 
tainly not  by  ignoring  and  losing  sight  of  the 
natural  and  only  laws  by  which  such  distribution 
can  be  determined. 

For  the  State  to  assume  the  ownership  of  all  the 
means  of  production,  of  all  wealth  used  as  capital, 
would  be  but  an  assumption.  The  ownership  of 
wealth  is  primarily  an  individual  relation,  and 
can  not  become  collective  without  the  voluntary 
contractual  consent  of  the  individual  owner. 
The  State  can  no  more  do  away  with  that  relation 
or  with  the  obligations  which  it  imposes  upon  the 
members  of  Society  than  it  can  annul  the  relation- 
ship of  parent  and  child  and  the  obligations 
thereby  imposed.     It  can  no  more  deprive  the  in- 


160  The  Orthocratic  State 

dividual  of  the  ownership  of  his  property  than  of 
his  right  to  produce  it.  Nor  does  the  individual 
abandon  private  ownership  of  his  wealth  by  using 
it  as  capital ;  he  thereby  merely  exercises  the  right 
of  control  which  ownership  implies.  Individual, 
private  ownership  of  the  wealth  of  a  people, 
whether  used  as  capital  or  not,  can  become  collec- 
tive or  public  only  by  express,  voluntary  consent 
of  its  millions  of  individual  owners,  a  consent 
which  if  secured  to-day,  as  it  can  not  be,  would 
in  no  way  affect  any  ownership  of  newly  begin- 
ning wealth-producers  of  to-morrow.  And  if  the 
State  can  not  become  the  owner,  it  can  not  justly 
assume  control,  of  such  capital,  since  to  owner- 
ship belongs  control.  Scant  benefit  would  there 
be  to  any  man  in  the  ownership  of  wealth  over 
which  he  had  no  control. 

Through  purchase  from  its  individual  owners, 
paying  them  out  of  land  values,  which  have  been 
seen  to  belong  to  the  public,  the  State,  in  the  exer- 
cise of  the  Public-serving  function  of  government, 
will  become  the  public,  collective  owner  of  all  the 
wealth  it  can  justly  control,  and  had  better  dis- 
charge the  manifold  obligations  and  exacting  du- 
ties of  such  ownership  and  control  before  it  as- 
sumes an  ownership  which  it  can  not  in  the  nature 


Civic  Problems  161 

of  things  acquire,  and  a  control  it  has  and  can 
have  no  right  to  exercise. 

It  may  be  well  to  observe  in  this  connection 
that  the  State  is  not  the  owner,  in  the  property 
sense  of  ownership,  even  of  the  factor,  land, 
whether  valuable  or  not,  for  that  which  no  man 
can  so  own  can  not  be  so  owned  by  all  men,  by 
Society,  nor  by  the  State.  Land  is  the  natural 
and  only  opportunity  for  human  existence,  whose 
use  belongs  by  natural  relation  and  right  equally 
to  each  and  every  individual  of  the  passing  gener- 
ations of  men.  Its  value,  arising  from  the  com- 
petition of  the  people  for  advantages  of  location, 
belongs  to  them  in  common,  being  the  value  of  a 
use  in  which  they  are  each  and  all  entitled  to  en- 
joyment of  an  equal  share.  Neither  land  nor  the 
value  of  land  is  either  property  or  wealth.  The 
value  of  any  land  is  merely  the  measure  of  an 
obligation  devolving  upon  its  holder  to  account 
for  the  value  of  the  advantage  of  occupying  it  to 
the  exclusion  of  others,  which  he  does  by  trans- 
ferring to  the  State  wealth  of  equal  value,  under 
the  name  of  rent. 

It  is  to  misconception  of  the  nature  of  property 
and  to  consequent  interference  with  the  right  of 
property,  that  prevailing  injustice  in  the  distribu- 


162  The  Orthocratic  State 

tion  of  wealth  is  largely  due.  Publicists,  and 
political  economists  even,  not  infrequently  talk  of 
property  as  if  it  were  an  institution,  something 
established  by  the  State  and  to  be  disestablished 
at  will.  It  is  not  an  institution,  but  has  its  be- 
ing in  the  nature  of  things,  prior  to  and  independ- 
ently of  any  institution  or  establishment,  even  of 
the  State  itself.  The  individual  precedes  the 
State,  which  is  but  an  institution  which  he  main- 
tains for  the  preservation  of  his  rights,  including 
the  right  of  property,  rather  than  for  such  irre- 
sistible and  irremediable  violation  of  that  right  as 
State  control  of  any  part  of  his  wealth,  whether 
used  as  capital  or  not,  would  inevitably  involve. 
Evils  arising  from  disregard  of  the  right  of  prop- 
erty are  not  to  be  remedied  by  still  further  disre- 
gard and  virtual  abandonment  of  it.  The  sensi- 
tive, economic  threads  that  feed  the  loom  of  co- 
operative industry  have  become  snarled  and  must 
be  untangled  before  they  can  be  warp  or  woof  of 
a  perfect  weaving.  Nor  will  it  do  either  to  strain 
or  to  compress  them  to  the  texture  of  a  set,  un- 
yielding fabric.  They  must  maintain  vitality  of 
fibre,  and  lend  one  another  the  firm  but  resilient 
support  of  a  continuously  voluntary  and  natural 
interweaving. 


Civic  Problems  163 

Since  problems  with  which  the  State  has  any 
proper  concern  are  such  only  as  arise  from  condi- 
tions due  to  abuses  of  its  power,  it  is  clear  that  the 
conditions  and  the  problems  will  disappear  when 
and  only  when  the  abuses  shall  have  ceased.  It  is 
to  privilege,  which  is  always  special,  and  neces- 
sarily incompatible  with  equal  enjoyment  of 
rights,  that  are  due  not  only  the  swollen  fortunes 
of  the  rich  but  also  the  no  less  swollen  misfortunes 
of  the  poor,  correlative  evils  caused  by  the  same 
abuses,  and  perhaps  equally  injurious  in  their 
effect  upon  the  character  of  a  people.  Confronted 
as  they  are  with  contrasts  in  fortune,  to  be  ac- 
counted for  on  no  theory  of  justice,  but  neverthe- 
less approved  by  the  State,  or  apologetically  at- 
tributed to  ways  of  an  inscrutable  providence ;  and 
living  under,  and  long  required  patriotically  to  up- 
hold, institutions  and  laws  which  they  instinc- 
tively know  that  the  State  has  no  more  right  to 
establish  or  enforce  than  has  the  mob  or  any  indi- 
vidual member  of  it;  who  shall  say  to  what  extent 
a  people's  innate  sense  of  justice  and  right  may 
thereby  become  eventually  warped  and  deadened? 

It  is  sometimes  urged  that  the  State  should  make 
special  effort  to  promote  individual,  personal 
righteousness,  from  the  absence  of  which  the  evils 


164  The  Oi'tJiocratic  State 

of  government  are  assumed  to  arise;  but  in  view 
of  the  example  set  by  the  State  itself  the  wonder 
is  that  men  are  as  upright  in  their  dealings  with 
one  another  and  even  in  public  affairs  as  most  of 
them  are.  Righteousness  means  right-way-ness, 
and  civic  righteousness  consists  in  the  endeavour 
of  the  citizen  to  have  civil  power  used  only  in  the 
right  way,  that  is,  in  such  way  as  to  wrong  nobody. 
Individual,  private  wrongs,  which  sometimes  at- 
tract so  much  attention,  as  indeed  they  always 
should,  are  nevertheless  almost  negligible,  in  re- 
spect to  their  evil  results,  when  compared  with 
those  committed  by  the  people  in  their  collective, 
civic  capacity.  It  is  to  the  latter  class  of  wrongs 
that  governmental  problems  are  due,  and  it  is  to 
correction  of  their  causal  abuses  that  the  citizen 
should  direct  his  attention,  remembering  that  how- 
ever scrupulous  he  may  be  in  the  ordering  of  his 
private  conduct,  he  can  not  be  a  truly  righteous 
man  if  he  neglects  his  duty  as  a  citizen. 

The  citizen  should  bear  in  mind,  however,  in 
considering  problems  of  popular  interest  that,  not- 
withstanding such  interest  in  it,  a  problem  may 
not  be  really  governmental.  Unless  the  evil  con- 
ditions sought  to  be  remedied  are  due  to  some 
abuse  or  abuses  of  civil  power,  to  some  govern- 


Civic  Problems  ^         165 

mental  fault  of  omission  or  commission,  the 
problem,  as  already  seen,  although  in  a  sense  so- 
cial, is  not  civic,  and  it  would  be  an  abuse  as  well 
as  a  waste  of  civil  power  for  the  State  to  undertake 
its  solution.  How  to  remedy  evils  resulting  from 
the  neglect  of  individuals  to  make  rational  use 
of  their  faculties  and  from  their  consequent  lack 
of  virtues  essential  to  the  highest  social  well-be- 
ing, is  a  problem  to  be  solved  by  men  as  men  and 
not  as  citizens,  and  without  resort  to  civil  author- 
ity. The  State  has  indeed  no  authority  to  act  in 
such  behalf,  and  whenever  it  assumes  to  do  so, 
when  it  attempts,  for  instance,  to  prohibit  vices 
involving  no  infringement  of  any  natural  right, 
no  interference  with  human  freedom,  it  invites 
official  graft  and  weakens  popular  respect  for 
legitimate  authority.  When  it  shall  limit  the  use 
of  its  power  to  efficient  discharge  of  its  proper 
functions  there  will  doubtless  be  less  of  such 
evils,  for  the  freer  men  shall  be  the  better  will  they 
be,  but  there  never  may  come  a  time  when  they 
will  be  equally  virtuous,  moral  or  benevolent,  or 
when  there  will  not  be  some  nobly  striving  to  lead 
their  fellows  to  higher  thinking  and  better  living. 
Enthusiastic  leaders  in  such  worthy  endeavour 
will  seldom  lack  the  support  of  sympathetic  co- 


166  The  Orthocratic  State 

workers,  but  however  numerous  or  influential  they 
may  become  they  have  no  right  to  compel  others 
to  aid  them  in  their  benevolent  work,  as  they 
would  by  resorting  to  civil  power  for  its  advance- 
ment. However  beneficent  its  activities,  the 
State  has  properly  nothing  to  do  with  benevolence 
or  generosity.  It  has  nothing  with  which  to  be 
generous,  and  is  concerned  only  with  justice,  and 
with  that  only  for  the  self -defensive  purpose  of 
maintaining  an  equitable  public  order. 

When  that  order  shall  obtain,  not  only  will  the 
problems  of  government  all  have  been  solved,  but 
the  ways  will  be  cleared  as  they  never  yet  have 
been  for  the  making  of  whatever  progress  it  is  in 
the  nature  of  mankind  to  achieve.  Human  na- 
ture has  never  yet  had  half  a  chance,  and  yet 
what  noble  specimens  have  there  been  in  every  age 
and  land.  What  may  we  not  expect  of  it  when  it 
shall  come  into  its  own;  when  man,  no  longer  the 
slave  of  precedent  nor  the  victim  of  experiment  in 
government,  shall  establish  the  orthocratic,  or 
rightly  governing  State,  a  State  whose  activities 
and  the  use  of  whose  power  shall  be  limited  and 
intelligently  directed  to  the  maintenance  of  a  civil 
order  founded  in  that  reason,  justice  and  freedom 
which  constitute  the  natural  order? 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 

Los  Angeles 

i:r*n  VJ'IWJI?^®'^  '^  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


WM2   197? 


.LI 

URL       " 


Form  L9-Series  4939 


JC    bOl.       C8 


UU  bUUlMtKN  MtblUNML  LIDttHnt  rHi.iLi  i  i 


AA    000  540  340    7 


